Politics & Power Quote by Francis Biddle

The bluntness is the point: a lawyer talking like an exterminator, outsourcing moral judgment to administrative logistics. Francis Biddle’s line isn’t a slip; it’s a performance of certainty at a moment when American institutions were busy converting fear into policy. The verb "catching" casts people as prey, not citizens. It smuggles in a premise that the state’s job is to hunt and warehouse a category of human beings, and that the only real question is scale: "every Japanese" across an entire geography, from the mainland to Alaska and Hawai'i. The ambition is total.

The phrase "now" is a pressure tactic, a demand to treat time itself as a security threat. War rhetoric loves emergencies because emergencies flatten debate. Calling them "concentration camps" is the most chilling tell. It suggests an awareness that these facilities aren’t benign "relocation centers" but instruments of confinement and control. The candor also hints at how euphemism works: even when insiders knew the reality, the public story could be cleaned up after the fact.

Context matters: after Pearl Harbor, West Coast paranoia, racial scapegoating, and political opportunism converged. Biddle, an establishment legal mind who would later be Attorney General, speaks from inside a system that prized order over rights when the targets were unpopular and racialized. The subtext is institutional cowardice: if you detain everyone, you can’t be blamed for missing anyone. It’s preemptive punishment disguised as prudence, and it reveals how quickly "law and order" can become a legal vocabulary for collective guilt.