On February 7, Mayor Hanson threatened to use 1,500 police and 1,500 troops to replace striking workers the next day, but the strikers assumed this was an empty threat and were proved correct. The Mayor continued his rhetorical attack on February 9, saying that the "sympathetic strike was called in the exact manner as was the revolution in Petrograd." Mayor Hanson told reporters that "any man who attempts to take over the control of the municipal government functions will be shot.

"Pressure from international officers of unions, from executive
committees of unions, from the 'leaders' in the labor movement, even
from those very leaders who are still called 'Bolsheviki' by the
undiscriminating press. And, added to all these, the pressure upon the
workers themselves, not of the loss of their own jobs, but of living in a
city so tightly closed."

Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson took credit for ending the strike and was hailed by some of the press. He resigned a few months later and toured the country giving lectures on the dangers of "domestic Bolshevism."

Between the strike's announcement and beginning, on February 4, the U.S. Senate voted to expand the work of its Overman Judiciary Subcommittee from investigating German spies to Bolshevik propaganda. The Committee launched a month of hearings on February 11, the day the strike collapsed. Its sensational report detailed Bolshevik atrocities and the threat of domestic agitators bent on revolution and the abolition of private property. The labor radicalism represented by the Seattle General Strike fit neatly into its conception of the threat American institutions faced.