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:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)