THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT for the New York Times arrived at San Francisco's diminutive airport, Mills Field, at 5:15 Monday morning (July 16). He and his fellow passengers had been warned there would be no transportation from the airport into the city, so they hitched rides with friends meeting two of the passengers. On the way in, through deserted streets and empty streetcar tracks, they saw two bakery wagons bearing permits from the General Strike Committee to deliver bread to hospitals. Gas stations displayed signs: "No Gas, Due to the Strike." They drove past National Guardsmen on duty at bridges and terminals. At the hotel, they were asked to be "conservative" in their use of towels since their laundry service had been discontinued until the strike was settled. The hotel's restaurants were closed and so were most others, except nineteen exempted by the General Strike Committee; by 8:00 A.M, long lines already waited at those. Some hotels, their restaurants closed to the public, issued identification cards to insure that no one but guests was served.

Streets usually crowded with streetcars, taxis, and private automobiles were now crowded with pedestrians. Thousands walked to office or shop, often using the middle of the empty streets. Bicyclists were frequent; a few made their commute on roller skates. Many carried brown paper bag lunches or working-class lunchboxes. Others paused to pick up a candy bar or two to carry them through a lunchless day -- "probably more milk chocolate sold here today than at any comparable period in history," the Times noted. Department stores were open; their managers met later in the day and decided they would remain open, but customer traffic was light. Barber shops were closed; cigar stores, running low on supplies, were limiting smokers to one pack at a time. In the nineteen open restaurants -- in a city of some three thousand eating and drinking places-hungry customers lined up behind the lucky ones who had seats and lines straggling from their doors, not without some jostling, lost tempers, even, the Times guessed, violence. Fresh supplies were hauled in -- under strike committee permits -- but not until late in the day did the lines slack off. The General Strike Committee quickly authorized an additional thirty-one restaurants to open for business Tuesday.

Paul Smith, writing as the Chronicle's financial editor, found business activity "slowly throbbing like a waning pulse to an almost lifeless standstill." Business leaders rushed plans for emergency operations, markets were dull. Elevator operators and janitors"unorganized and intimidated" was Smith's gratuitous comment- responded to the general strike call. Some businessmen munched canned sardines, hunks of cheese, and stale buns "on polished mahogany desks, over which fortunes in currency have passed and repassed," the Chronicle said. Many went without. An ILA committee urged liquor stores and bars to close for the duration of the strike. (A newspaper report said a Mission street beer tavern had boarded up its smashed windows and posted a sign saying "Done by mistake-union place.") The six hundred-strong Chinese Laundry Workers Union came out on strike. Non-organized teamsters and truck drivers in Marin County joined the walkout and were waiting to be organized. Employees of Liggett and Myers, a major cigarette distributor, sent a delegation to the Labor Temple looking for a union organizer.

Movie houses closed down, legitimate theaters and night clubs were dark. Radio stations broadcast without interruption, except where union musicians were required. The San Francisco Seals called off their customary night games in favor of daylight baseball. Crews halted work on both the San Francisco-Oakland and Golden Gate bridges, not yet spanning the Bay. At the Commercial Club "leading citizens," under the direction of the president of the Pacific National Bank, ran the dining room, their wives in the kitchen. The Joint Marine Strike Committee's bulletin listed what, because of the general strike, "you can't do: go to the movies, call a taxicab, get your trousers pressed, buy gasoline, eat in a hotel dining room, get a shave or haircut, buy fresh vegetables, have your automobile repaired, board a boat for Tahiti or even Los Angeles, move your household goods, get your shirt washed, go to a night club." Beyond the obvious services that directly and immediately affected consumers, much of the business and industrial life of the city slowed or came to a standstill. Factories and shops were shut down - often because their employees spontaneously joined the strike. Little moved except "by permission of the General Strike Committee." Some businesses continued operations, but customers were scarce.

Employees of the city's major streetcar line, the privately owned Market Street Railway, had walked out at 2:00 A.M. Sunday for their own demands rather than in sympathy with the general strike. Carmen on the Municipal Railway met, then without the formality of a vote, simply failed to show up for work. As city employees with civil service status and pensions, they faced a special problem. Edward Vandeleur, who headed the Muni carmen's local as well as the San Francisco Labor Council, had tried to keep the cars in the barns without strike action. Vandeleur had appealed to Utilities Manager Edward G. Cahill to withdraw service because of the intimidation and violence that threatened the men if they took out the cars. Cahill refused.

Instead, a special, early morning, two-hour meeting of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) (in the home of a sick member) instructed Cahill to resume operations immediately and to forfeit the civil service status and pensions of employees who failed to return to work. The General Strike Committee proposed the cars, on returning to service, carry a sign saying they were operated by the committee's permission. The PUC refused. The committee yielded, sending the Muni carmen back to work with its thanks "for their sympathy and assistance."' It was the first of the committee's efforts-expanding food supplies, providing gas, opening additional restaurants-to cushion the impact of the general walkout on the public (or, some militants said, to liquidate the general strike).

An estimated 15,000 building tradesmen in the East Bay had laid down their tools; now they were joined by some 2 7,000 workers affiliated with Central Labor Council local unions. The East Bay's street car system and the Key System ferries halted operations; commuters who flocked to the still-operating Southern Pacific (SP) lines to get to San Francisco were angered when the SP refused to honor the Key System's commute tickets. Employers were especially upset, J. Paul St. Sure recalled, when the Key System's employees' strike resolution called for the employees "and the workers of the community to take over the transportation system for working people." St. Sure said he and several businessmen, "frightened" by the prospect of "an actual class struggle," had asked Governor Merriam to send the National Guard into Oakland. 2

San Francisco's troubles provided an abundance of grist for the mills of the pundits and editorial writers, who turned out virtually instant volumes of exegesis and explanation, counsel and condemnation. In the main, they ignored the view of the general strike as basically a sympathetic protest. Rather they clung to the image of a political strike with serious revolutionary intent. To columnist Walter Lippmann the general strike, "a political weapon," could succeed only if it paralyzed the whole life of the community. The leaders of the San Francisco strike appear unwilling, he thought, to make it really general. That they are unwilling to starve the public only means they will incur all the disadvantages of angering the public without achieving its only possible success-that is, replacing the government. The unwillingness of these "ordinary American trade unionists" to use it as it can only be used insures its increasing ineffectiveness and ultimate defeat. 5