THE TEAMSTERS' WALKOUT on Thursday morning (July 12) marked the real start of San Francisco's general strike. The Strike Strategy Committee had made no report, proposed no plans, nor had the San Francisco Labor Council yet acted. But one local union after another followed the teamsters on strike, set dates to strike, or authorized a strike when and if the council or committee called for it. Sympathy, anger, and the determination to join the fight boiled up, finding unmistakable voice in the workers' many and independent decisions to act, with leaders or committees or without them. The general strike was clearly on and rapidly becoming more general, hour by hour.

Joining some 25,000 maritime workers on strike that morning were San Francisco and East Bay teamsters, numbering together over 4,000. Nearly 200 wholesale butchers on both sides of the bay had quit work; they would be joined the next morning by 1,500 retail and jobbing butchers, and on Sunday morning by 2,600 laundry drivers and workers and unknown numbers of culinary workers. Twenty-five San Francisco and six East Bay unions had voted to walk out if the Strike Strategy Committee recommended joint action. Thirteen unions were in the process of voting; the Building Trades Council was collecting the vote of forty-eight building trades locals. Cleaners and dyers walked out on behalf of their own demands. Boilermakers left their jobs in sixty shops. Labor Council President Vandeleur refused to comment on what actions the Strike
Strategy Committee might take at its meeting that afternoon, but
he did say: "Do you fellows have to see a hay-stack in the air before
you can see which way the straws are blowing?"

When the new General Strike Committee convened the next morning, it promptly ejected a delegation from the Marine Workers Industrial Union, since it was not affiliated with the AFL. The committee then voted to create an appointed executive committee of twenty-five (later fifty). Vandeleur was elected chairman by acclamation; Clyde W. Deal of the Ferryboatmen defeated Bridges for the vice chairman's post. After Bridges declined a nomination for secretary, Kidwell was chosen. The committee turned down by voice vote a move to defer a decision until Monday as well as a motion "to join in a General Strike immediately." It finally approved a motion asking "all unions that have voted in favor of a general strike to walk out Monday, July 16th at 8 a.m., and that all other unions which have not voted be asked to hold meetings immediately and take action." Roll call recorded 63 unions, voting as units (315 delegates), for the amendment, 3 (15 delegates) against (including the teamsters' 5 votes, cast by Casey, some said to protect the local against discipline by its international union; others saw it as his last-ditch stand against a general strike). Forty-nine unions (245 delegates) were recorded as not authorized to vote. "Radicals in Full Sway,'' the New York Times portrayed the decision. It was taken, the Chronicle reported, not without its usual slant, "amid scenes of wildest conditions, with hundreds of delegates shouting and scores of others in a condition approaching hysteria." It also reported that conservative labor leaders fought for four hours to avert the mass walkout, though their opposition was not reflected in the final vote. What seems clear is that the debate was focused less on averting a general strike, more on how to call it. Clearly, neither the "radicals" nor the "conservatives" were in full sway, but rather a broad, cross-section of the unions, left, right, and center, moved into action.

If the atmosphere around the Labor Temple that morning was confused and hysterical, it was nothing compared to the panic and confusion that welled up in the newspapers. The Chronicle reported that "While the rest of the city may go hungry, suffering privation and cold, every family of every man on strike in San Francisco will be provided with food, clothing, gasoline, and other necessities of life." It printed a one-sentence denial by "John F. Schelly" (actually Shelley, later head of the Labor Council and State Federation and San Francisco's congressman and mayor). Not until Monday did the Chronicle print (on an inside page) Vandeleur's and Kidwell's full-scale denial. To their denial, however, the Chronicle added it "DOES NOT" retract its original story. The Chronicle also reported that martial law would be invoked "within an hour after a general strike goes into effect." The Ninth Army Corps at the Presidio promptly denied it but the Chronicle insisted that "those claiming to know the facts" asserted plans were ready. Clarence S. Morrill, chief of the State Bureau of Identification, put a message on statewide teletype that "radical strikers and Communists were preparing to throw kerosene bombs on trucks carrying food." It was the Chronicle, too, that warned of a "communist army marching on San Francisco from the northwest." The "army" planned to destroy railroads and highways, paralyze transportation and communication. The invaders were reported near the state's northern border. In fact, neither martial law and bombs nor the army materialized.

Electrical workers had voted to defer a decision on joining the general strike. An official said its action was intended to avert the "widespread catastrophe" that would result from interruption of service. International Typographical Union President Charles P. Howard arrived to take part in the printers' last-minute negotiations with the publishers. A year earlier-in the spring of 193 3-the publishers had demanded a 10 percent wage cut from the printers. Publishers had reinforced their demand with three hundred professional strikebreakers, supplied by the American Newspaper Pub- lishers' Association's open shop department, and even then lounging around the corner in the posh Palace Hotel. Now, with the general strike due to start the next morning, the publishers quickly offered to restore the cut and make it effective at once. Howard carried the offer to the printers' meeting. Despite vigorous opposition, it was adopted by a three-to-one vote. The question of joining the general strike was not specifically raised but the new contract effectively insured uninterrupted publication of the Bay Area dailies.

The General Strike Committee announced that nineteen restaurants would remain open Monday -- some 3,600 seats for a city of 700,000. Union permits would allow suppliers to provide food to them. At the same time, it said, it was planning a special police force intended to prevent violence and cooperate with regular police. Permits would be issued to continue milk and bread deliveries. Bridges proposed the committee establish food distribution depots throughout the city. Strikers would prevent profiteering, regulate distribution, and prevent hardship. "If the people can't get food, the maritime workers and longshoremen will lose the strike," Bridges said. At the same time, he warned attempts to run picket lines with nonunion food trucks would "create disorder and violence." "If the trucks try to move, the men will try to stop them-I can tell you that." In the East Bay, Charlie Real, head of the teamsters, said trucks operating with union permits would furnish supplies to East Bay Commission houses; the public would be expected to obtain their supplies at these distribution points. Mayors of Bay Area cities in a joint declaration announced that their people must be fed; if the strikers did not make arrangements to do so, they would.

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.

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."