The longshoremen's strike was barely three weeks old when Ralph Mallen, the ILA publicity chairman, touched on the possibility of a general strike. Some local unions invoked the possibility in letters to the city's unions-some, Sam Darcy said, at the instigation of the Communist Party. 12 The ILA strike committee had pro- posed a twenty-four-hour work stoppage. On June 11, the ILA asked unions throughout the area to consider a sympathetic strike in support of its strike. The June 19 mass meeting was, Sam Kagel has suggested, a testing ground for the idea. 13 A leaflet circulated in advance of the meeting urged "a solid front of all workers" as the necessary response to the Chamber of Commerce-Industrial Association plans to use force to break the strike. More than one of the speakers called for a general strike. Machinists, Lodge 68, informed the San Francisco Labor Council that on June 20 its membership had voted to participate in a general strike if the unions affiliated with the Council deemed it necessary "to aid the striking unions on the waterfront." 14 Still, when an ILA delegate, Charles (Curley) Cutright, raised the question in the June 29 Labor Council meeting, it was met with applause that Eliel called "only scattered" and the ILA Strike Bulletin "a wave." The butchers' representative declared that if the employers attempted to open the port, union workers in the city's meat jobbing houses would be called out. The teamsters' joint executive board told the council that it had taken a stand against a general strike and had asked its affiliates to take similar action. Other unions would also look at the possibility in the days immediately ahead, but it was at the moment little more than a distant rumbling.