It is an axiom among historians of Congress that, both in history and in journalism, disproportionate attention is focused on the role of the president. No monograph focusing primarily on the role of Congress, for example, has ever won the Pulitzer Prize for History or the Bancroft Prize. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of books about presidents, while the much rarer studies of Congress almost always focus only on prominent leaders. “Overshadowed by presidents and social movements,” historian Julian Zelizer has noted, “legislators remain ghosts in America’s historical imagination,” the institution itself “a mystery” to most Americans.
The enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 provides a recent but hardly unique example. An enormously complex statute, the ACA consumed over a year of congressional deliberations, the longest Senate deliberation in modern history, legislative drafting by three major House committees, and extraordinary parliamentary maneuvering to achieve a final product. Yet the law is often generically described as “Obamacare,” originally a disparaging term that President Barack Obama and the press came to embrace. Only rare accounts focus on the months of consensus building on Capitol Hill that produced the bill that the president signed.
A far less prominent illustration of this executive branch bias occurred earlier this year. In July 2024, the US Navy finally bowed to three decades of congressional pressure to exonerate African American sailors who had been wrongly punished following the 1944 Port Chicago Naval Magazine disaster. While welcome and worthy of praise, Secretary Carlos Del Toro’s decision came too late for the 258 men involved, including 50 sent to federal prison on a bogus mutiny charge. Despite steady pressure from Congress, presidents and secretaries had refused for decades to act on the very same evidence that prompted Del Toro’s decision.
California’s Port Chicago Naval Magazine was one of the largest munitions loading and shipping facilities on the West Coast during World War II. It was also a rigidly segregated facility, as was most of the US military at the time. White officers supervised hundreds of Black sailors who, although trained for combat, instead were shunted into loading and mess operations. The dockworkers complained about the lack of training for the hazardous loading procedure, and representatives of the longshoremen’s union warned that the facility was courting disaster. The officers dismissed the warnings and assured workers that the bombs could not explode.
The officers were wrong, tragically so. During loading operations on the night of July 17, 1944, a series of massive explosions ripped through the piers. One 440-foot ship simply vaporized, as did a locomotive and hundreds of sailors, mostly Black loaders. Fragments of a second ship were found hundreds of yards away. Bits of ships, railcars, piers, and bodies were blown 12,000 feet into the air. The force of the explosion, which registered as far away as Nevada, equaled one-third the force of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima the following year. The worst home-front disaster of World War II, 320 men died and hundreds more suffered physical and emotional injuries, many permanent.
In the aftermath, white officers were given hardship leave while the surviving Black sailors were ordered to gather up the body parts of their colleagues. Then, before the cause of the explosion was determined and without additional training or adoption of safety procedures, they were ordered back to loading bombs on ships.
Over 250 sailors—all Black—refused, citing safety concerns. Threatened with wartime crimes that could result in their execution, 50 stood their ground. Charged with mutiny, a crime rarely prosecuted in the US Navy, they were convicted quickly in an all-military trial that reeked of prejudice. Despite interventions by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, their appeals were rejected and the convicted were imprisoned. Only after the war ended were the men released. With rare exceptions, accounts of the explosion, the trial, and the convictions disappeared from history. Few survivors mentioned their experience, even to their families.
In 1989, Berkeley sociologist Robert L. Allen published The Port Chicago Mutiny, the first scholarly effort to shed light on the all-but-forgotten historical record. At about the same time, as a staff member for Congressman George Miller, who represented the California district where the tragedy occurred, I began an investigation that culminated in hearings at which Port Chicago survivors finally could testify about their mistreatment and how they had lived for decades in fear of their story being disclosed. When I tracked down one survivor of the explosion to explain the congressional inquiry, his first words were “I have waited 40 years for this phone call.”
Within a few years, Miller—then chairman of the Natural Resources Committee—passed legislation establishing a national memorial at the site. In 1999, President Bill Clinton responded to an appeal from Miller and issued a pardon to one surviving sailor, Freddie Meeks. But efforts in Congress to clear other sailors’ names met with bureaucratic indifference over the next quarter century. In conjunction with House Armed Services Committee chair Ron Dellums and Senator Barbara Boxer, Miller legislatively compelled a navy review in the mid-1990s that admitted chronic racism in the base’s operations but implausibly argued it did not affect the verdict, and so the convictions remained on the men’s service records.
Over the years, as those who had been imprisoned passed from the scene, relatives rejected any effort to secure pardons, believing an acceptance of one would constitute an admission of guilt. Led by Miller, and then his successor, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, a memorial support organization called the Friends of Port Chicago joined with veterans’ organizations and civil rights, legal, and other activists to continue efforts to clear the sailors’ names. DeSaulnier won inclusion in several House defense bills of a provision directing the navy to exonerate the men, as Congress had done for Captain Charles McVay, who had been unjustly court-martialed following the sinking of USS Indianapolis in 1945. Unfortunately, opponents in the Senate repeatedly refused to accept the House language.
The advocates persisted, imploring successive administrations from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden to reconsider the case. Navy officials, including the commander of the base that now occupies the Port Chicago site, embraced wiping the slate clean, but no formal action was taken until Del Toro instructed his legal staff to review the case’s sordid record after he became secretary in 2021. On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the explosion, the secretary announced he would sign the exoneration order. After more than 30 years of effort, the records of the Port Chicago sailors were wiped clean at long last.
Largely missing from the events and statements surrounding the exoneration celebration that followed was recognition that these officials did not act alone. It was only protracted efforts by Congress and advocates that pressured the navy into a belated reversal of the charges. The secretary’s press release announcing the exoneration included no mention of the work by Congress to persuade a recalcitrant navy, Pentagon, and White House to clear the names of the sailors. The statement issued by President Biden proclaimed that “after conducting a careful and deliberative review, the U.S. Navy has determined that the courts-martials . . . were fundamentally unfair, plagued by legal errors, and tainted by racial discrimination.” Similarly, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asserted that “the Department of Defense has moved to rectify an old injustice,” which furthered the misimpression that the navy had initiated the exoneration effort.
These statements did not acknowledge Miller, who spent half his 40-year House career pressuring the navy to reverse the convictions, or the crucial roles played by DeSaulnier, the Friends Committee, and other groups and individuals, like Thurgood Marshall Jr., who rallied in favor of the action. Most news accounts reflected this same distortion. The New York Times proclaimed “Navy Exonerates Black Sailors Unfairly Convicted After World War II Disaster,” and yet nowhere in the story was the lengthy congressional campaign recognized.
The important lesson here is already familiar to those who study Congress: a chronic emphasis on the executive branch that minimizes or ignores altogether the difficult and protracted work on Capitol Hill required to implement a successful policy. Commonplace phraseology like “President Obama passed the Affordable Care Act” or “President Trump passed a sweeping tax cut” is a familiar illustration of this misallocation of credit that ignore the months and years of drafting legislation, holding hearings, considering amendments, negotiating to assemble the votes to convert the recommendations of presidents (as well as congressionally initiated policies) into laws. Indeed, absent the diligence of Congress, the president would have no bills to sign into law. Directing attention to the essential role of representatives and senators in shaping public policy not only provides a more accurate account of such history but also helps enhance the often disparaged or overlooked contributions of the legislative branch.
The successful effort to exonerate the Port Chicago sailors demonstrates how important events that have been scrubbed from our national memory can be resurrected into the historical narrative. But the story also demonstrates why it is crucial for those who investigate and write our history to embrace a more complex and nuanced view of how important successes are achieved. With the welcome exonerations, the arc of the Port Chicago story has been at long last completed—but innumerable other long-overlooked and distorted cases await additional revelation.