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From 1880 to 1980 the Pullman Company repeatedly turned to photography to shape the attitudes and behavior of its workers. It built the Pullman Car Works and adjoining town on the fringes of Chicago as a model industrial community with the goal of resolving the endemic conflict between capital and labor. However, despite its claim that the model town was intended as purely "practical" philanthropy—that is, that sanitary and beautiful conditions would increase profits by improving workers' performance and preventing strikes—Pullman could not achieve its goal without also creating affective bonds with workers.

Although much has been written about the history of the German Communist Party, little is known about who actually belonged to it or supported it. Yet knowledge of the social composition of German Communism is an important, in many ways crucial, factor in assessing the role of the KPD in the development of the German workers' movement during the Weimar Republic. Aside from a census of party members conducted by the national leadership in 1927, and voting returns in elections, there are no national sources on which to base an analysis of the social structure of the Communist movement in Germany. Local and regional sources, though sporadically preserved and until now little exploited, offer an alternative way to determine the social bases of German Communism. This article contributes to the history of the KPD by attempting to analyze one source about support for German Communism in a major industrial city. In October 1923 the KPD staged an insurrection in Hamburg, resulting in the arrest and conviction of over 800 persons. A social analysis of these known insurrectionaries can indicate some of the sources of support for the KPD and suggest some of the ways in which the KPD fit into the history of the German working class and workers' movement.

The decision of German employers in the Rhenish-Westphalian iron and steel industry to lock out workers in November 1928 rather than accept binding arbitration of a dispute over wages marked, in retrospect, the beginning of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. The strongest group of German capitalists, from the center of German heavy industry, frontally attacked the governing parliamentary coalition. It did so to stop the extension of socioeconomic reforms, if possible to reverse those that had been instituted since 1918, and above all to challenge that policy of state intervention in economic affairs which regulated class conflicts and institutionalized labor union influence.