Criticism
During his long political career as the general secretary of the CPUSA, Hall was criticized by nearly every part of the American political landscape.
His pro-Soviet stance led him into conflict with various Trotskyist groups and individuals. When the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was prosecuted under the Smith Act in Minnesota in 1949, Hall supported the government actions, although he later admitted this had been a mistake. Hall was accused of holding a vision of class struggle rooted in the early 20th century and of not understanding the socioeconomic changes taking place in the postwar society. In the early 1990s, disgruntled party members demanded more openness and democratization of the party.
Soviet officials criticized Hall for poor leadership of the CPUSA. Young American Communists were advised to distance themselves from Hall and the CPUSA, as the party was seen lacking any capacity for revolutionary action. The CPUSA was under FBI surveillance and infiltration and thus had no potential.
Many conservatives saw Hall as a threat to America, with J. Edgar Hoover describing him as "a powerful, deceitful, dangerous foe of Americanism." An inflammatory anti-Christian statement was falsely ascribed to Hall, earning him the hostility of some Christian groups, including Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority.
Read more about this topic: Gus Hall
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)