COMMENTATIONES SCIENTIARUM SOCIALIUM 79 COMMENTATIONES SCIENTIARUM SOCIALIUM 79 Tuomas Savonen Tuomas Savonen Tuomas MINNESOTA, MOSCOW, MANHATTAN his study examines the life and political line of Gus Hall Gus Hall’s Life and Political Line Until the Late 1960s T(1910-2000), the long-time general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), up until the late 1960s. The first main part of the study examines Hall’s Finnish American background and his life until 1959, when he became the general secretary of the CPUSA. The second main part studies Hall’s political line during the first decade of his general Gus Hall’s Life and Political Line Until the Late 1960s the Late Until Line and Political Life Hall’s Gus secretaryship. The latter part is, to a large extent, based on the MANHATTAN MOSCOW, MINNESOTA, documents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the mid-1950s the FBI managed to infiltrate two of its informers into the very top of the CPUSA. In the 1960s, the two informers, Morris and Jack Childs, provided the FBI detailed information on Gus Hall and his relations with the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries. Thanks to the Childs brothers, the FBI became fully informed about, for example, the Soviet Union’s financial support to the CPUSA. In addition to more than 20 000 pages of FBI’s intelligence documents, this study is based on a wide variety of other historical sources, including interviews with numerous former and current CPUSA members. Tuomas Savonen is a graduate of the University of Helsinki, Doctoral Program in Political, Societal and Regional Change. This PhD study was submitted in the field of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki in 2020. *9789516534513* ISBN 978-951-653-451-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-951-653-452-0 (pdf) THE FINNISH SOCIETY OF SCIENCES AND LETTERS The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters HELSINKI 2020 COMMENTATIONES SCIENTIARUM SOCIALIUM 79 Tuomas Savonen MINNESOTA, MOSCOW, MANHATTAN Gus Hall’s Life and Political Line Until the Late 1960s Academic dissertation To be presented for public discussion with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, in Hall 1, Metsätalo/Forsthuset, on Friday, 11th of December, 2020 at 12 o’clock noon THE FINNISH SOCIETY OF SCIENCES AND LETTERS HELSINKI 2020 Editor: Jan Sundberg Copyright © 2020 by Tuomas Savonen and The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters Cover design by Nord Print Cover photo: All Over Press The series Commentationes Scientiarum Socialium is part of the publishing cooperation between The Finnish Society pf Sciences and Letters and the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, established in 1996. This book has received a subsidy granted by the Ministry of Education and Culture distributed by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies Distributor: Bookstore Vetenskapsbokhandeln Snellmansgatan 13, FIN-00170 HELSINKI, Finland [email protected] www.tiedekirja.fi ISSN 0355-256X ISBN 978-951-653-451-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-951-653-452-0 (pdf) Oy Nord Print Ab Helsinki 2020 To the two wonderful women in my life, Tuuli and Aava Summary This study examines the life and political line of Gus Hall (1910-2000), the long-time general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The study consists of two main parts. The first main part studies Hall’s Finnish American background and his life until 1959 when he became the general secretary of the CPUSA. The information has been gathered from various sources, including Hall’s own autobiographical writings which have been studied – like all other sources – critically. The second main part focuses on the 1960s and looks closely at Hall’s political line during the first decade of his general secretaryship. The primary source material of the second main part consists of intelligence documents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In its Operation Solo, the FBI managed to infiltrate two of its informants into the CPUSA’s top leadership. The informants followed the party’s general secretary closely, creating a collection of more than 21 000 pages of documentary material during the first decade of the operation. As the informants were responsible for the CPUSA’s relations with the Soviet Union, the Operation Solo material includes a wealth of behind-the-scenes information concerning the international communist movement and the Soviet Union’s financial support for the CPUSA. By 2020, the FBI has only published the documents from the first ten years (1958-1968) of Operation Solo. As a consequence, this study is limited to examining Hall’s activities only until the end of the 1960s. The study shows that Gus Hall’s political line went through several major changes over the decades. Young Arvo Halberg – as Gus Hall was then known – joined the Communist Party in 1927 when Joseph Stalin was gradually tightening his grip on the Soviet party and the international communist movement. Young Arvo had become aware of the special role of the Soviet Union already in his childhood when he followed, with avid interest, the occurrence of the October revolution in Russia. Arvo Halberg’s Stalinist upbringing was perfected in Moscow’s International Lenin School where he studied in the early 1930s. As a hot-tempered young man in the 1930s, Halberg – who in the mid-1930s changed his name to Gus Hall – was sometimes ready to resort to violence in order to improve the conditions of the working class. Such an orientation may have at least partly reflected the fact that his father – like many other Finnish Americans in Northern Minnesota in the beginning of the 20th century – had belonged to the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in which sabotage was seen as one possible means of influence. In the early 1940s Hall gave his support to the Americanized communism of the CPUSA’s general secretary Earl Browder. In the mid-1940s, as the party went through a dramatic leadership change, Hall re-invented himself as a supporter of the more Soviet-minded communism of the new party leadership. Such re-invention was helped by the fact that during the leadership change Hall was fighting against the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean and not taking part in party politics. iv In the late 1950s Hall once again re-invented himself as the party went through a tumultuous change following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations concerning Stalin and the Hungarian uprising. As Hall was in Leavenworth federal penitentiary during the most heated phases of the CPUSA’s infighting, he was able in 1959 to enter the leadership race as a fresh face, untarnished by the recent clashes within the party. Instead of being a Soviet-minded admirer of Stalin, Hall now represented himself as a moderate centrist who was ready to reform the CPUSA. Reforms were few, however, during Hall’s first decade as general secretary. As the Operation Solo documents and other sources show us, the party continued closely following the political line of the Soviet Union. As a consequence, the party was not considered to be an interesting alternative for the young radicals of the 1960s, most of whom saw the Soviet Union as a staid and stodgy bureaucracy. They rather supported the youthful revolutionaries of Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Mao’s China – both of which Gus Hall abhorred. Similarly, Hall had a highly negative attitude towards the political line of the Italian Communist Party, which many Hall’s critics within the CPUSA saw as a viable alternative for the American party. Hall’s Soviet-minded line was best exemplified by the CPUSA’s reaction to the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The CPUSA was one of the few Western Communist Parties which wholeheartedly accepted the Warsaw Pact measure. As this study shows, the party’s line was not unanimously accepted among the membership, as many CPUSA members left the party following the occupation. As Hall’s political line changed several times during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s he can be accused of opportunism. In the 1960s, however, his line was consistent. It can be best described with the concept of proletarian internationalism. In the language of the international communist movement, proletarian internationalism self-evidently included the idea of the Soviet Union’s unchallenged leadership. The Soviet Union was, after all, the first socialist country which could serve as a guiding star to all other countries despite cultural, historical and social differences. v Preface Working in a news agency is fast-paced and versatile work, and as such, it is often superficial. A news agency journalist rarely has time to get to know his or her topics even a little more thoroughly. This may start to feel trite over time, especially if the journalist has an inherent tendency to dig deeper into things. As a counterbalance, the journalist may begin to yearn for a project in which he or she can immerse himself or herself in all the branches and details of the matter under investigation, without any hurry whatsoever. This is what happened to me. As I am writing this, I have been on the payroll of Finnish News Agency STT for almost 20 years. Although it has been fascinating – and even addictive – to live in the midst of the busy stream of the latest news, it has been a blessing to have a peaceful getaway to which one can retreat: the intriguing world of American communism. Due to the hobby-like nature of this project, the work proceeded at a leisurely pace for many years. Especially in 2009-2012, during my three years as the Brussels correspondent of the STT, very little progress took place in my Gus Hall research.