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:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)