Joe Dallet

Joe Dallet’s life was a deliberate break with the comfort into which he had been born. A Communist organizer in Youngstown and later a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, he made political commitment the organizing principle of his adult life; his death in battle turned that commitment into a public martyrdom and abruptly ended his marriage to Kitty.

Identity and Political Formation

Born in 1907 to first-generation American parents of German-Jewish origin, Dallet grew up in a family whose prosperity came from his father’s success in the silk trade. He and his sisters attended a temple in the middle-class Jewish community of Woodmere, Long Island, but at thirteen he refused a bar mitzvah. He attended private school before entering Dartmouth College in 1923, already a political radical who championed what he called proletarian ideals. His classmates regarded him as an eccentric misfit; after failing most of his courses, he left Dartmouth halfway through his sophomore year and took a job with an insurance company in New York.

The secure path proved temporary. Although successful at the insurance company, Dallet quit in disgust and set out to remake himself as a laboring man. The execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in August 1927 became a defining political shock: Dallet later wrote his sister that he could scarcely say what his life would have become had the two Italian-born anarchists not been executed. Determined to sever the signs of his sheltered upbringing, he worked first as a social worker and then as a longshoreman and coal miner. He joined the Communist Party in 1929 and told his worried family that Party work was what he believed in, wanted to do, and most enjoyed. During a period in Chicago, after speaking before a crowd of thousands, he was beaten by the city police’s Red Squad.

By 1932, Dallet was organizing unions in Youngstown, Ohio, at the front line of the Congress of Industrial Organizations campaign to organize steelworkers. He faced violent confrontations with the steel companies’ hired men, and local police jailed him on several occasions to prevent him from speaking at labor rallies. He also ran for mayor on the Communist Party ticket. Politics for Dallet was not simply a declared allegiance: it placed him in the streets, in the workplace, and at personal risk. Kitty, whom he married less than six weeks after they met at a New Year’s Eve party, had to demonstrate her own commitment before she was allowed to join the Young Communist League. She sold the Daily Worker and distributed leaflets at factory gates, wearing tennis shoes so she could run when police arrived.

Their life in Youngstown made the costs of that commitment tangible. The couple paid five dollars a month for a dilapidated boardinghouse and relied on government relief checks of $12.50 every two weeks. Their stove leaked, so they ate two meals a day at a grimy restaurant. Kitty paid ten cents a week in Party dues and, in the summer of 1935, served as the Party’s literary agent, encouraging members to read Marxist classics. Yet the hardship and the couple’s different expectations of Party loyalty began to strain their marriage. By 1936, after two and a half years of extreme poverty, Kitty told Dallet she could no longer live that way and left for London. Dallet’s life remained centered on the Party, while Kitty’s commitment could not be made to fit the same unyielding terms.

Separation, Reconciliation, and the Spanish Civil War

In early 1937, Dallet volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic against the fascists in a Communist-sponsored brigade. He and his old comrade Steve Nelson sailed for Europe aboard the Queen Mary in March. Dallet still hoped to repair his marriage: he told Nelson that he thought he and Kitty would soon work things out. When the ship reached Cherbourg, France, Kitty was waiting at the dock. The three spent a week together in Paris, with Nelson accompanying them. Kitty had brought enough money from London for them to stay in a decent hotel and eat in good restaurants, a striking contrast to the poverty of their Youngstown years. Over meals, she spoke of wanting to follow Dallet to the Spanish battlefields.

The obstacle was not lack of resolve but Party policy: Communist officials had decided that wives could not accompany their husbands to Spain. Dallet argued that Kitty could contribute by doing useful work, even driving an ambulance, but their efforts to bend the rule failed. On their last day together, Kitty took Dallet and Nelson shopping for warm flannel shirts, wool-lined gloves, and wool socks. Dallet left for Spain with Nelson; Kitty returned to London, intending to wait for another chance to join him. They corresponded often, and she began sending him a photograph of herself each week. In a letter to Nelson’s wife, Margaret, Kitty described a mass meeting of 30,000 people protesting Western neutrality in the war. Unable to understand the speeches, she was swept up instead by the crowd’s singing of the Internationale on the subway and the roar of the gathering. The letter ended with her sign-off, “Comradely yours, Kitty Dallet.”

In Spain, Dallet became political commissar to the 1,500-man McKenzie-Papineau Battalion, a largely Canadian unit that had absorbed many American volunteers from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. During the summer, he and his men trained for combat. Writing to Kitty, he described the exhilaration he felt behind a heavy machine gun, connecting its sound to the gangster movies he had enjoyed and relishing the reversal of being on its business end. His letters thus carried both his enthusiasm for the fight and the danger that enthusiasm embraced.

The Republican cause was losing ground, facing fascist forces supplied with aircraft and artillery by Germany and Italy. The left was also fractured by violent internal disputes. Dallet’s Spanish Communist superiors promised a “cleaning out” of anarchists among the troops; by autumn, he was supervising trials of deserters, and one account held that some men may have been executed. His conduct made him deeply unpopular with his own soldiers, some of whom viewed him as an ideological zealot. A Comintern report recorded open dissatisfaction and talk of removing him. Dallet knew he was disliked and feared that his men saw him as a political officer who stayed safely behind the lines. In a small hut at night, by the faint light of a kerosene lamp, he confided to a friend that he would prove his courage by being the first man over the parapet. The friend warned that this was a foolish way to lead a battalion; Dallet remained adamant.

Four days after the report, Dallet led his men into the Battle of Fuentes del Ebro. He kept his promise, leaving the trenches first and advancing toward the fascist line on the exposed left flank, where the fire was heaviest. Machine-gun rounds struck him in the groin after he had gone only a few yards. A battalion machine-gun commander later reported that Dallet continued to behave heroically and refused to let medics approach while he lay exposed. As he tried to crawl back toward the trenches, another burst of fire killed him. He was barely thirty. The manner of his death fulfilled the proof of courage he had demanded of himself, but at the cost of the life and reconciliation he had hoped to resume with Kitty.

Nelson learned of Dallet’s death while in Paris and arranged to tell Kitty in the lobby of her hotel. She had come from London expecting to meet Nelson and then continue to Spain; she was crushed by the news, collapsed against him, and clung to him as he wept with her. When she asked what she would do, Nelson impulsively invited her to live with him and his wife, Margaret, in New York. Kitty accepted only after he persuaded her not to proceed to Spain to volunteer as a hospital worker. She returned to the United States a twenty-seven-year-old widow. The Communist Party USA publicly framed Dallet’s sacrifice as a life given to the struggle against fascism, and, with Kitty’s permission, published his letters in the 1938 collection Letters from Spain. Kitty stayed for a time with the Nelsons, under considerable emotional strain, while continuing to encounter Dallet’s Party associates. The public memory of Dallet as a working-class martyr therefore followed a private bereavement that remained difficult for his widow long after his death.

The Political Afterlife of Dallet’s Circle

Kitty’s years with Dallet continued to matter as part of the political history she later had to explain to government investigators. She acknowledged having known several Communist Party officials, including Earl Browder, John Gates, Gus Hall, John Steuben, and John Williamson. But she drew a clear boundary around her own membership: she said she had left the Party when she left Youngstown in June 1936 and had stopped paying dues. The distinction placed her departure from Dallet’s life and from the Party at the same point, though the political associations formed during their marriage remained part of her recorded past.

One detail narrowed that past further. Kitty told investigators that she had met Browder only once: he had come to Youngstown to see Dallet, and they had dinner together. The encounter situates her contact with a major Party figure within Dallet’s organizing world rather than as evidence of a continuing political role of her own. Dallet had made Party commitment central to his life; Kitty’s later account emphasized that she did not carry her membership beyond their separation.

The distinction mattered in a period when political association itself could be treated as evidence of disloyalty. The FBI was investigating Oppenheimer and other officials connected with atomic policy, and later the AEC’s charges against Oppenheimer again invoked his associations with Communists alongside his policy dissent. The supplied record does not make Dallet a specific charge in that case. It does show how the political world in which Kitty had lived with him remained legible to investigators years after his death, even as she described her own relationship to the Party as concluded.

Temperament and the Meaning of His Commitment

Dallet combined a cultivated manner with a deliberate embrace of working-class politics. Tall and gaunt, with dark curly hair, he spoke fluent French, played classical piano with ease, and knew dialectical materialism; he had grown up amid family prosperity and left Dartmouth for an insurance job before rejecting that path. His turn toward labor was therefore not simply the continuation of a working life he had inherited, but a conscious remaking of it. The gap between his upbringing and his chosen identity helps explain both the force of his commitment and the strain it placed on his marriage: for Dallet, political conviction governed not only what he believed but how he meant to live.