1994, Pittsburgh's Communists kept the faith

The corpse of the Soviet Union was cold when I met Denise Winebrenner Edwards, the Communist Party's organizer for Western Pennsylvania, and her cellmates. But her zeal for socialism was still hot.

In the early 1990s, when the poor Soviet Union found itself at the bottom of the dustbin of history, I thought it’d be fun to do a feature on the local head of the Communist Party, USA. Denise Winebrenner Edwards was easy to find, pleasant to talk to and even happy to give a long-time libertarian a signed CP USA membership card.

Endangered political species

March 13, 1994

The Soviet union is history.

Socialism is an idea in world retreat.

But Denise Winebrenner Edwards is one comrade who still knows how to enjoy a good laugh.

In 1992, for instance, when she was unsuccessfully running for Congress as an independent in the 18th District, she met Elsie Hillman, the rich, powerful and generous Fairy Godmother of the Republican Party U.S.A.

Edwards is a fireplug of a woman with the firm handshake of someone who used to ride a 650 Honda and worked eight years in the Edgar Thomson Works as a millwright.

She knew right away she and Hillman were not exactly classmates, socioeconomically speaking.

"It was very clear when I met Elsie Hillman that she and I are from two different planets," Edwards says, laughing heartily as she sits in a hard booth at the Dunkin Donuts franchise in Collier.

"No question about it, she's a very nice person. But when she asked me what I did for a living, I didn't think fast enough to ask her what she did. I told her I'm the district organizer for the Communist Party, and she said, 'Ohhhh- hh,' and walked away."

Edwards has another loud laugh at the memory. No hard feelings on her part. It was just Class Struggle as usual.

Hillman is from Planet Kapital and rides around in cars fit for a robber baron/commissar. Edwards is from Planet Working Class and drives a 1985 VW Golf diesel with 185,000 hard miles on it.

She earns her daily bread — $10,000 a year plus mileage — writing for the People's Weekly World and tending the remnants of Western Pennsylvania's once fairly formidable Communist flock. The only thing Edwards and Hillman have in common is that her father, Walter, and Hillman both voted for George Bush in 1992.

Edwards, 42, is an endangered political species — a full-time, card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA.

She lives in Wilkinsburg with her Communist husband George Edwards and their Communist dog Scruffy, who, at 8, is too young to officially join the Party. It's too bad, because Edwards and her Party can use all the new comrades theycan get — even Hillman, she says, especially if the Party could expropriate her zillions.

With the crack-up of the Soviet Union — an event the Party press euphemistically calls the "crisis in the socialist countries" — the CPUSA has become invisible.

Its media presence is zilch. Nobody cares what it thinks on issues like health care or gun control. Politicians can't earn votes by attacking it. For decades the FBI surveilled, harassed and intimidated its members, and, the joke goes, grossly inflated its membership with hundreds of undercover agents. Now the FBI is more worried about bootleg CDs.

Edwards says the CPUSA is invisible — but not irrelevant — in large part because its members are still getting used to being out in the open. "We're coming out of a glacier of 40 years of oppression," she says.

The Party has to move forward cautiously, she says, promising that its voice will be heard from again locally. As a first step, she intends to work for "jobs and equality. Public works jobs with apprenticeships and training run by the unions with a strong affirmative action component.”

Edwards was a history major at West Virginia University when she became a Communist in 1972. Deciding to join was a slow process. It came after a lot of reading about capitalism and socialism, and it was influenced by her frustration over the Vietnam War and her work with coal miners who were fighting to reform the United Mine Workers. She concluded, at 21, that socialism was the wave of the future in America — something she still believes.

After college she wasn't able to get a local teaching job and ended up at the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock. She completed a four-year apprenticeship, becoming the works' first woman millwright.

Mike Montedoro and crane operator Bill Barnhart worked in the 44-inch mill with Edwards until she left in the mid-'80s to go to Cleveland to work for the CPUSA's paper, the Daily Worker. Both agree she worked hard, pulled her own weight and caused no trouble. They also knew she was a Communist because she passed out the Daily Worker at the mill.

There's no doubting Edwards is a Communist. She can talk forever about the sins of capitalism — an unfair, racist and imperialist system that she says is doomed to failure — and the glories of socialism — a kinder, gentler peaceful system whose ideals have never been properly put into practice.

She knows the bios of the heroes of the American labor movement like boys know their Babe Ruths and Jackie Robinsons. She has virtually nothing critical to say about the Soviet Union and says she was impressed by accomplishments of the socialist society she found there during her second visit to Moscow in 1988.

She also can fully explain how the Soviet Workers Paradise went to Hell: Not because it was an "Evil Empire" with an intrinsically oppressive, clumsy form of government, but because its leaders losttouch with the working class and failed to realize that the people wanted such consumer goodies as Calvin Klein jeans.

Edwards can put a Marxist spin on everything from black-on-black inner-city violence to whether a Steelers quarterback performs enough socially useful labor to deserve a salary of almost $3 million a year.

What's the Party line on Lorena Bobbitt? "Women's equality and abuse of women- -working-class women. In a sense, it was inevitable what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, ex-Marine."

Drug dealing? "The ultimate capitalism.There's no taxes."

The difference between President Bush and President Clinton? "Clinton is a real S.O.B. — a Son of Bush."

Between Reagan and Clinton? "The only difference is, we don't hear the strident rhetoric, the 'Evil Empire,' 'Let's blow em up.'... On the social issues, things are different. Fundamentally, it's worse. NAFTA. NAFTA was a bad thing for the whole working class."

Naturally, Edwards is rich in ideas for using government to solve every social, economic and political ill, local or national. She says bringing back Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration would put people to work. And if the federal funding that "Reagan stole and gave to Wall Street bankers" in the '80s could be restored to Allegheny County, it could be used to build health centers and treat the economic casualties living among the ruins of the Mon Valley's ex-steel towns.

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Politics. Politics. Politics.

It's no wonder Edwards decided to run for Congress in the Mon Valley in 1992 against Republican Rick Santorum and Republican-turned-Democrat Frank Pecora.

She ran as an independent, and not a Communist, because she was also representing labor, women and civil rights groups who wanted an alternative to what Edwards called "two Republicans."

She only received 3,600 votes, but learned a lot. "I've seen up close and per- sonal what the hell's going on. I understand why people drop out of the system and get aggravated and say this thing is just so screwed up there's no end in sight.

"But I also know that until these civil rights leaders, trade unionists and community leaders begin running for office, seriously, outside the Democrat Party, the sewer is just going to get deeper and funkier and the bodies are going to continue to pile up. Because the basis of the problem is not being discussed. We have to tax U.S. Steel, Mellon Bank. We gotta tax their profits. Why? Our city is in crisis, that's why."

Meanwhile, Edwards and her comrades continue their lonely struggle against capitalism, racism and imperialism.

She counts about 100 dues-paying members in her district, which includes Pennsylvania from Harrisburg west. They pay $60 a year, if they can afford it. Most of them, she says, are under 40, and whites outnumber blacks about 70 to 30. Edwards is a little ashamed of the Party's low percentage of women, but hopes to remedy that.

Party membership is a fraction of what it was in the '30s, when the North Side alone had 100 card-carriers and Communists were lively troublemakers. In 1941, for instance, the secretary of the Communist Party of Western Pennsylvania got two years in the county workhouse and 25 other Reds served jail terms for forging signatures on an election petition.

Edwards' everyday duties are not so anti-social. She says she's not a pacifist and would use violence in self-defense. And she's been arrested herself, in her anti-Vietnam days and most recently while supporting Teamsters in their strike against the Pittsburgh Press in 1992.

But her job is basically part bureaucrat and part social worker. She keeps the Party organized and meeting regularly, recruits new members, raises funds, helps run the Party's bookstore in Garfield and keeps in touch with elderly members to make sure they're doing OK.

She also reports for People's Weekly World, formerly the Daily Worker, which is distributed free at picket lines and sold for 50 cents in about 20 news boxes in the city.

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Recently, Edwards met with her husband, George, and three other Party board members at the Communist bookstore in a shabby block of Penn Avenue in Garfield.

Wearing blue jeans, a leather jacket and a "Jobs Not Jails" button, she was surrounded by shelves of books on everything from Marxist thought in India to biographies of Lenin and Yoko Ono. She consistently addressed the men as "comrades" and briefed them on her and George's recent car trip to the National Committee meeting in New York City.

It was in New York that Edwards had thought of her latest idea.

Gas heating bills for January will be exceptionally high in the Pittsburgh area because of the abnormally cold weather, right? So why not try to get the state to put a cap on gas bills, so that they'd be no higher than December's bills?

Utilities shouldn't get windfall profits because of the weather, she said, getting no argument as they turned to discussing petitions and press conferences as ways of getting the idea out to the public.

This must have seemed like pretty tame stuff for the bookstore's four veteran Communists. Sam of Carrick, Ashton of Homestead and Lou of Pittsburgh, as they preferred to be known, have 171 years worth of lifetime Party membership among them.

Edwards calls these men the Party's treasures, and none expresses any doubts or regrets about the radical paths they chose long ago, even though they and their families suffered often when they lost jobs or were harassed by the law.

Sam was beaten up by police in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1940 for collecting ballot petitions for the Party. Ashton, 75, joined the Party 55 years ago because of the racism he encountered in U.S. Steel's Homestead Works. "It was the only group of people I knew that stood against it," he said.

Lou, 83, joined the Party in 1928. He fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the Fascists and was called to Washington in 1954 by McCarthy's committee on charges of plotting to kill the senator. It was an absurd charge, he said, and he took the Fifth Amendment.

George Edwards was studying to be a minister at Oberlin College in Ohio in the late ‘30s when he found another religion— socialism. By 1942 he had quit his student preaching and was a member of the Party and working for U.S. Steel in its Lorrain, Ohio, mill.

George has never done anything as a Communist that he wished he hadn't. "I've always been on the side of legality," he says, then adds that he was a deputy sheriff for years in Ohio. He and Denise have been married about seven years, but they first met long ago during some Party political activity that George can't recall.

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Believe it or not, Denise and George have a life outside the Party. She plays the trumpet, loves music, listens to classic rock and R&B and admits to watching MTV occasionally.

They recently took in an opera at the Met in New York City and caught Tammy Wynette at the Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va. Occasionally, she works as a dance deejay at Christmas parties for steel workers.

Edwards' father, Walter, is a club deejay. too, and sometimes she works with him when she visits her native Baltimore. They've always gotten along, she says, when she was a teen-ager and after she became a Communist.

They talk politics, "but we sort of have a truce where we don't get into big arguments." He supported her when she ran for Congress but tried to persuade her to run in a major party.

Edwards is also a Civil War buff with a special interest in visiting battlefield sites. Her favorite movie isn't "Reds," Warren Beatty's paean to the Russian Revolution of 1917; it's "Matewan," John Sayles’ mostly true love song to exploited West Virginia coal miners.

George, the cook in the family, describes his wife "as a very active and devoted gal and "a really good representative of our Party."

Is she different from other Communists he's known? Better humored? Less serious? Is she the stereotypical American Red?

"She's not average or typical, but she's not atypical," he says. "We have all kinds of people. It's very important to us that we're not stereotyped as not being human. We welcome the idea that we're shown to be normal people — you've seen some of the stuff that's been written."