Year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the United States government was intercepting and decoding secret messages from the Japanese islands and the Japanese government. During that period, relations with the Japanese government and with the rest of the world, especially with the United States, were extremely tenuous. To avoid a war, which began to loom in the waters of the Pacific, off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands, the territory of the United States, Great Britain, the United States and other countries of the world demanded that all trade be directed to the Japanese Islands were blocked and assets frozen, which eventually caused a near-collapse of the Japanese economy. In the early fall of 1941 the U.S. government, knowing that a possible war was approaching, secretly requested that Japanese immigrants and the large population of Japanese Americans (those born in the United States) be questioned about their loyalties. “The President of the United States ordered a special intelligence investigation to be conducted” (Armor and Wright, 13-14). According to our reading of Shea, the President of the United States used his prerogative power to appoint a representative of the State Department to conduct such an investigation (Shea, 259). “The investigator provided the President with a report, which later became known as “The Munson Report,” which certified a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty within this generally suspect ethnic group” (Weglyn, 34). Because of this investigation and the information provided it indicated that the Japanese were loyal and did not pose a problem or threat, however with the cover-up of this document pro-internment hysteria spread throughout the West Coast and the rest of the country . “Proclaimed......middle sheet......US Concentration Camps: Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Print. Gesensway, Deborah and Mindy Roseman. Beyond words, images from American concentration camps. New York: Cornell University Press, 1987. Print.Grodzins, Morton. The Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. PrintHouston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James Houston. Goodbye to Manzanar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973. Print.Myer, Dillon S. Uprooted Americans: Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority during World War II. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970. PrintShea, Daniel M. Living Democracy. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2013. PrintWeglyn, Michi. Years of Infamy The untold story of America's concentration camps. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976. Print.