Biography
George Watt, also known as Israel Kwatt, was a New York student organizer and Communist who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. He served as a political commissar in the Lincoln-Washington Battalion. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, survived being shot down over occupied Europe, and escaped through the Comet resistance network. Arrested in Pittsburgh on November 4, 1953, he became one of six Cleveland Smith Act trial defendants. His five-year sentence, imposed March 23, 1956, was reversed on appeal May 23, 1958, with a new trial ordered.
Cuyahoga jail custody reported in December 1953
The December 19, 1953 Laisvė, page 3, names George Watt at Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland in a current-prisoner greeting roster supplied by a prisoner-aid committee. The individual name and Cleveland case context match this profile. This establishes reported actual jail custody by that contemporary roster, before the later trial and sentencing; it is not merely a sentence or arrest report. The list supplies no initial booking day, release date or complete duration. None is inferred from its publication date or the subsequent sentence.
