Joe Dallet

Dallet was born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in Woodmere, Long Island.[1][2] His parents were Hilda Dallet (née Stern) and Joseph Dallet Sr, a wealthy silk manufacturer.[3][2] He attended Woodmere Academy, Lawrence High School, and in 1923 he enrolled at Dartmouth College.[4][5][6] He left college in 1927 without graduating and took a job in insurance with Massachusetts Mutual Life.[7][2]

In 1928 he became active in the labor movement and began working as a longshoreman.[5] He then worked in steel mills in Pennsylvania and Ohio while organizing for the Sheet and Metal Workers Industrial Union.[5] Dallet worked to hide his wealthy upbringing and Jewish background.[7] In 1929 he joined the Communist Party and married Barbara Rand, who he later divorced.[5][6] Dallet became a well known communist and labor organizer in the Midwest.[5]

In 1934 he became the common law husband of Kitty Puening, who would later marry physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.[7]

In 1934 and 1936 Dallet was a communist party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 1935 he ran to be mayor of Youngstown, Ohio.[5][8]

In March 1937, Dallet sailed for Europe to fight in the Spanish Civil War.[2][5] On March 27, Dallet and a group of fellow volunteers were arrested by a French border patrol while trying to enter Spain from France by boat.[5][9] Following a high-profile trial and 21 days in prison they were released.[5][9] They successfully crossed the Pyrenees into Spain on April 22 under the cover of night.[10][2] In June 1937 Dallet was appointed political commissar of the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion.[2][5]

Dallet's authoritarian leadership style was unpopular with the men serving beneath him, who formed a grievance committee to try and remove him. An overnight meeting was held on October 12 to consider the complaints against Dallet.[11][5] Dallet tried to resign his position as commissar, but his resignation was rejected.[11] The following day Dallet was shot and killed on the Aragon front near Fuentes de Ebro while advancing in his first battle.[12][2][note 1]

Kitty had been en route to join Dallet in Spain. Dallet's letters to Kitty were published in 1938 in the book Letters From Spain by Joe Dallet: American Volunteer, To His Wife. Dartmouth College awards an annual student prize in Dallet's memory.[13]

• Dallet, Joe (1938). Letters From Spain by Joe Dallet: American Volunteer, To His Wife. New York: Workers Library Publishers.