That evening, Mayor Rossi summoned Lapham and Phleger to his office. He had issued a second proclamation of emergency, assuming a broad array of municipal powers. As Lapham remembered the conversation, the mayor was hoping there was some way it could be settled, even at the last moment, perhaps by conceding the hiring hall. " 'Do you realize what you're asking, Mr. Mayor?,' Phleger responded. 'You're the mayor of this town. A general strike is against the city government and all government. It would be a disgrace in the face of a general strike if we conceded anything.' Rossi in effect shrugged, 'All right, whatever you think.' "

Vandeleur and Kidwell issued an eleventh hour statement, drafted by Henry Melnikow and Ray McClung, a newspaperman and associate, and approved only hours before by the General Strike Committee, defending labor's actions and arguing that the strike was called "purely for the enforcement of trade union policy." The employers were "dead wrong" in trying to portray the general strike as the culmination of communist and radical upheaval, Melnikow said. The statement ran in one edition of the News, in none of the other papers. "The newspaper and the powers that be in San Francisco did not want the world to know that this was an economic strike ... not a political revolution," Melnikow commented. 22 In a letter to the mayor, Vandeleur and Kidwell for the General Strike Committee declared that labor had no intent to paralyze production or distribution or overthrow government. It is simply defending itself "from an anti-labor crusade ... an un-American attack on principles of organization and collective bargaining." The men who helped to build the city and to develop the high standards of the labor movement "are now prepared to make further sacrifices to preserve these standards." They are acting out of "loyalty to their principles as working men."