ON THE FOURTH day (Thursday, July 20), the General Strike Committee voted to end the general walkout. Through more than seventy hours of the general strike, the unending, day-and-night, round-robin of talks had gone on. Repeatedly and emphatically the union leaders were told the general strike must be called off before settlement of the underlying disputes could be seriously discussed, even though a clear pattern for settlement was, by now, in plain sight. Both the General Strike Committee and the National Longshoremen's Board had proposed arbitration of all issues by all parties-longshoremen and seamen, longshore employers and shipowners. But the general walkout had to be ended before the proposals could be put to work and the threat of martial law ended. The efforts to persuade Mayor Rossi to ask Governor Merriam for martial law appeared intended less to insure public order than to crush the general walkout and force labor into a broad retreat. The governor was willing but the mayor was stubbornly resisting. Edward Vandeleur and the strike committee leaders were faced with the insistent demand to end the general strike that barred the way to a settlement of the waterfront strikes.

[...] Mayor Rossi, for his part, congratulated the "real leaders" of the union forces on their decision. San Francisco, he said (in a statement probably drafted by John Francis Neylan), had stamped out "the very real danger of revolt." But, Rossi added, "The crushing of this strike cannot be allowed to be used "to destroy union labor or its rights." He pledged his efforts to "secure justice" and defend "his fellow citizens" against "unfair aggression." To the Committee of Five Hundred he pledged: "I will, to the full extent of my authority, run out of San Francisco every communistic agitator."