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The coup attempt sparked a flash of excitement at party headquarters, which is located across the street from the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan. About 8:30 a.m. every workday, Hall's chauffeur-driven Oldsmobile (he buys American and uses a cellular phone) pulls up to the curb in front of the eight-story brownstone, where staff members, still harboring paranoia left over from the days when the FBI tapped their lines and read their mail, answer the phone "4994" and dispatch envelopes without the party's name. Once in the building, Hall, a four-time presidential candidate, climbs into a creaky elevator for the slow ride to the top floor and its glass cases of dusty party memorabilia. In his office, he settles into a black recliner behind his desk, on which rests a copy of the People's Weekly World and an American Express appointment calendar.
Since before he started shaving, Hall, whose parents were charter members of the Communist Party U.S.A., has been steeped in the revolution. Born Arvo Kusta Halberg, son of a carpenter in Minnesota's iron range, he went to work after the eighth grade as a lumberjack to help support his family. Long hours in the deep woods at a dollar a day educated him. "Working in lumber camps in those days," he recalls, "would make a communist out of anybody." He joined the party in 1927 and spent several years in the early 1930s at Moscow's Marx- Engels-Lenin Institute. When he returned, the brash youngster started organizing workers and getting in trouble. In the Little Steel Strike in Warren, Ohio, authorities charged him with using explosives, and in Minneapolis they arrested him for inciting a riot. In 1940 he was convicted of fraud and forgery in an election scandal and spent 90 days in jail.
In 1948 Hall and 11 other communists were indicted under the Smith Act on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. He jumped bail and fled to Mexico, was captured in a border motel, and spent several years in a maximum security cell at Leavenworth, right beside Machine Gun Kelly. Such exploits built a mythic aura around Hall, who, two years after his release in 1957, became general secretary of a party in turmoil. Gone were the halcyon days of 1932 when a communist candidate for President garnered 102,000 votes. Between McCarthy's witch-hunts and Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, the party was hemorrhaging.
Fewer than 10,000 party members remain (though Hall claims 15,000), and some are fomenting revolt from within. They blast Hall's Stalinesque grip on the party and push for more openness and democratization. Party members' letters, filled with criticism about Hall and his hierarchy, crisscross the country. % "There's a revolt brewing, and there are going to be some walls falling down," predicts party member Conn Hallinan. "Gus has to go. I don't care if the man shows up in love beads and says, 'Everybody do your own thing'; he'd still have to go." Dorothy Healey, a longtime foe who left the party in 1973 but still has pipelines into it, agrees. "It's like that old Lord Acton saying: 'Power corrupts,' " says Healey. "It's very sad because it's not just the Communist Party but the left that has to come to terms with a new reality." Says Hall defensively: "I've always said we'd be a dead party if we didn't have differences."