10/20/00 9:50 a.m.
Comrade Gus
On the fate of the Communist Party leader.

By Ronald Radosh, author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, forthcoming from Encounter Books

he world is hardly mourning the death of Gus Hall, who until he passed away last week, was General Secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A. from 1959 — shortly after its membership began to collapse as the result of Nikita Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" to the Presidium in Moscow about Stalin's crimes — until a few months ago, when he resigned because of ill health.

Born in 1910 as Arvo Gus Halberg to Finnish immigrant parents who lived in Cherry, Minnesota, and who also belonged to the as yet young Communist Party, Hall followed in the family business and left his small town and poor surroundings to work in lumber camps, eventually moving on to Minneapolis to organize unions and conduct rallies for the Young Communist League. Hall finally ended up in Youngstown, Ohio, which in Party theory, was the kind of place that was supposed to be the breeding ground for the eventual Communist revolution — a working-class town in which the union workers belonged to the industrially organized CIO union, the United Steelworkers. The Party sent him to the famous Lenin School in Moscow, where he was trained in theory as well as the tactics of sabotage and warfare. Returning to the U.S., the avuncular Finn from Minnesota led a bomb squad of his comrades, who blew up houses of steelworkers opposed to their organizing efforts. Despite a conviction for a misdemeanor, Hall was able, once war broke out, to join to the U.S. Navy, where he was stationed in Guam.

While Hall was in Moscow, he must have seen and known about hundreds of his fellow Finns from Minnesota's iron range, who made the commitment to move to Moscow to help build communism, and provide necessary muscle for needed industrial laborers. They went to Karelia, near Finland, where after their arrival, they were arrested, sent to the Gulag and executed in secret. Hall never protested or made any comment about this, although he undoubtedly knew many of the victims personally.

At the war's end, Hall made yet another pilgrimage to Moscow, where he was obviously groomed for the Party's top leadership, a goal that he realized after leading a tough attack on the Party's previous leader, Eugene Dennis, whom he accused of not being servile enough to the Soviets. As the Party's top leader during the years of the Clinton presidency, Hall offered whatever meager support to the President he could during the impeachment crisis. Referring to the "witch hunt to destroy Clinton," Hall echoed the charges of the First Lady and the president's most ardent defenders, which he called the "work of a right-wing conspiracy, mastered, and managed by Newt Gingrich." One could not give him credit for originality.

Hall tried his best to latch the party onto the growing winds of radicalism that emerged in the 1960's and 70's, but his orthodox Marxism-Leninism removed him from any meaningful ties to the New Left, although, with the recruitment to the Party of Angela Davis, Hall did achieve a tenuous and troublesome link to the new radical black militants. It was under Hall's leadership that Moscow continually was pressured to up the amount of the long-standing Soviet subsidy that allowed the CPUSA to thrive in barren soil. In 1987, Hall wrote the Politburo asking them to double the yearly stipend to four million dollars, necessary to achieve a major breakthrough for the fortunes of American communism. The blackmail worked; with fears of the Reagan presidency alarming the Soviets, they thought that agreeing to an annual payment of $3 million a year might help them win allies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a shock, and Hall sent some cadre to Moscow to join in the opposition to Boris Yeltsin. As Yeltsin's troops shelled the radio tower and parliament, as hardliners were opting for a military coup, they were joined therein by American Communists, who under Hall's guidance were symbolically pledging their loyalties to the dying system. Always an optimist, reality did not change Hall's mind. As Czechoslovakia and Hungary fell, Hall assured his followers that the "power and influence of world capitalism are declining," and he wrote that anyone who thought that that East Germany "is going to leave the path of socialism is indulging in wishful thinking." Hall never made known what he told his comrades a brief time later, when once again reality interfered with his theoretical outlook. As the obituary in the New York Times noted, Hall ended his life still filled with hope — the face of the future, he thought, could be found in North Korea.

In 1991, the Party faced its final disastrous split. A large corps of its old Guard, including Angela Davis, the formerly hardline Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker, the New York Party leader Gil Green, and the black activist Charlene Mitchell all quit or were expelled, and formed a rump group they called The Commitees of Correspondence, in essence a CP without Hall's leadership that had decided to abandon total fidelity to the now departed Soviets and to Stalin. Although the remnants of Hall's group had but a few thousand members, as it turned out, they had millions of dollars on which to live into perpetuity, the result of shrewd investments of the formerly provided Soviet subsidies.

The Party may no longer register in our political and cultural life, as it did in its heyday in the 1930's and 40's, but the funds the new opposition failed to obtain — although it sued in federal court — allows it to continue as if its existence matters. Indeed, Hall sat on a treasury estimated at worth a minimum of $7 million, as well as valuable mid-Manhattan real estate. This money allowed Hall and the other Party leaders to live the life of an American corporate CEO. Hall lived in a big mansion in Yonkers, New York, complete with sauna, an expensive art collection, and an underground garage. His license revoked because of his Smith Act conviction in the 1950's, Hall drove to work in a chauffer-driven Cadillac, which he replaced with a new car every two years. He also had an estate and boat in the Hampton Bays, as well as a fleet of Arabian racehorses kept in a Minnesota horse farm, donated to him as a gift from Leonid Brezhnev.

All this information came from one of Hall's former disgruntled comrades, Michael Meyerson of New York, who once led the U.S. division of the Soviet World Peace Council, and who sat with Hall on the CP's National Council. Siding with the dissidents in 1991, Meyerson spilled the beans in public about the Party and Hall's wealth — although prior to his break, he too must have enjoyed the various perks of Party leadership. Hall's holdings may have paled in comparison with those enjoyed by former foreign comrades like Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu or East Germany's Erich Honecker who dwelled in a giant country hunting lodge, but nevertheless, the receipt of $21million by the American CP from Moscow during the waning years of the Cold War is no small sum to quip about. Hall undoubtedly knew the old radical aphorism, that "nothing is too good for the working class;" but in his version, it must have been translated into something more along the lines of "nothing is too good for the self-appointed leaders of the working class." At least, we can be thankful that by the time Hall passed away, he lived to see the collapse of the entire world he believed in, and the shedding of the illusions that went along with it. North Korea, after all, just doesn't do the trick for most people.