Maurice Isserman, professor of history at Hamilton College says, "Apart from Kim Il-Sung and Fidel Castro, no Communist leader in the world ruled his own party as long as Gus Hall ruled over American Communists. The single great achievement of Hall's political career is that he kept the American Communist Party a bastion of Stalinist orthodoxy for four decades, while most of the rest of the international Communist movement was in a state of nearly continuous internally-generated crisis and upheaval. That also helps account for the total irrelevance of Communism in American society and politics, save, occasionally, as a bogeyman for conservatives, during the years of Hall's ascendancy."
Isserman is an expert on 20th-century U.S. history and was called by The New York Times Magazine, "the best regarded of the left-wing scholars of Communism." A former Fulbright grant-winner, Isserman authored The Other American - The Life of Michael Harrington, (Public Affairs) which was reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Widely acknowledged to be one of the preeminent historians of the 1960s, Isserman co-authored a history of that decade, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, published by Oxford University Press. An expert on reform and radical movements, Isserman recently published an editorial about Dorothy Day in The Nation and an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times about the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
