Gus Hall - Indictment During The 'Red Scare' and Rise To The Head of The CPUSA

Indictment During The 'Red Scare' and Rise To The Head of The CPUSA

Now a major American communist leader in the post-war era, Hall caught the attention of US officials. On July 22, 1948, Hall and 11 other Communist Party leaders were indicted under the Alien Registration Act, popularly called the Smith act, on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence," although his conviction was based on Hall's advocacy of Marxist thought. Hall's initial prison sentence lasted for five years.

Released on bail, Hall rose to the secretariat of the CPUSA. When the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act (June 4, 1951), Hall and three other men skipped bail and went underground. Hall's attempt to flee to Moscow failed when he was picked up in Mexico City on October 8, 1951. He was sentenced to three more years and eventually served over five and a half years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. In prison he distributed party leaflets and lifted weights. He was located in a cell adjacent to that of George Kelly, a notorious gangster of the prohibition era. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed some convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional.

In the early 1960s, Hall was in danger of facing yet another indictment, this time under the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act, but the Supreme Court found the Act partly unconstitutional, and the government abandoned its charges. The act required "Communist action" organizations to register with the government, it excluded party members from applying for United States passports or holding government jobs. Because of the Act, Hall's driver's license was revoked by the State of New York.

After his release, Hall continued his activities. He began to travel around the United States, ostensibly on vacation but gathering support to replace Dennis as the general secretary. He accused the general secretary Dennis of cowardice for not going underground as ordered in 1951 and also claimed Dennis had used funds reserved for the underground for his own purposes. Hall's rise to the position of general secretary was generally unexpected by the American Communist circles (the post was expected to go to either Henry Winston or Gil Green, both important figures in the YCL) although Hall had held the office of acting general secretary briefly in the early 1950s during Dennis's arrest. In 1959, Hall was elected CPUSA general secretary and afterward received the Order of Lenin.