The Secret Munson Report Back
In 1941, a special representative of the State Department, named Curtis B.Munson was told by the former American President, Roosevelt, to write a report about the loyalty of Japanese Americans in California and Hawaii. The intelligence was to investigate especially in those two states because most of the Japanese Americans were living there.
The year before messages going in and out of Tokyo had been controlled, and the American government became suspicious after finding messages which asked Japanese agents on Hawaii about information concerning the Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. These messages gave America reason to expect an attack of Japan on Pearl Harbor. Immediately Curtis B. Munson was put in charge of writing his report to ascertain if there were any spies among the Japanese Americans.
The final conclusion of this report was that the Japanese Americans were perfectly loyal to the United States.
But when Japan finally attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 in 1941 the American government decided not to publish The Munson Report. The report became one of the war’s best kept secrets. To justify the transport of every Japanese American into a concentration camp it was unimaginable to publish Munson’s report as it proved the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Furthermore, it would have been difficult to sort out the dangerous ones in a short time, so to play it safe all should be locked up.
In fact, only the State, War, and Navy Departments were informed about The Secret Munson Report. The President himself received the report only after it had been analyzed, scheduled, and reviewed by the general staff for three months.
Finally, President Roosevelt decided that all Japanese-Americans -with no exeptions- were to be sent to "relocation" camps like Manzanar. Naval Intelligence and the FBI were the only institutions which were convinced about the loyalty of American people with Japanese decent, and therefore, both of them were against the President’s Executive Order 9066.
As a final statement, it is interesting to note that the generation of the nation’s youth, who had grown up knowing nothing or little of so colossal a national scandal as American-style concentration camps, suddenly demanded to know what it was their parents and grandparents had gone through and what they had tried so hard to forget.