That weekend, too, the secretary, whom Roosevelt had left in charge of the problem, was summoned to Secretary of State (and "acting president") Cordell Hull's office. She found him huddled with Attorney General Homer S. Cummings over a stack of law books. In their opinion -- based on a thirty-year-old article by an elderly gentleman [P. Tecumseh Sherman] who had once been Commissioner of Labor Statistics in the State of New York -- the situation in San Francisco was legally a general strike and called for drastic action under both federal and state law. Perkins protested. A general strike, she argued, was "a strike of a large body of workers planned and coordinated in advance to force the government to take a position on some matter of interest to them." She said Hull and Cummings both thought the National Guard and the U.S. Army should be used to put down the "general strike." She told them the situation was in no way "alarming," that the likelihood was remote that it would go beyond a brief strike of delivery and transportation services, and that it seemed "unwise to begin the Roosevelt administration by shooting it out with working people who were only exercising their rights, under our Constitution and law, to organize and demand collective bargaining." She insisted, in any case, before anything is done, the president must be consulted. From the Houston, the president thanked her for her "estimate of the situation." He suggested an offer of arbitration in his name; he also, confidentially and diplomatically, Perkins thought, suggested consulting with Hull and Cummings as to "our authority to maintain food supply and traffic in the affected areas." The president's formula blithely ignored the several boobytraps that had already brought down several other arbitration proposals. Whatever the reason, the secretary noted, the offer was not made.