True for one year
Poor sleep tonight. Though the air conditioner tries hard, it doesn't get the job done after several days of heat. Everything is warmed up, everything radiates. The AC can't keep up.

Woke after four hours, tried to bring back sleep by focusing ears on OTR programs. Sometimes it works, but not tonight. Ended up listening to several Calling All Cars episodes, including this one from March 1937. CAC laid the foundation for both Gangbusters and Dragnet, but didn't have the trademark style of either one. Each CAC show had a slightly different flavor and some good semi-classical theme music. In this 1937 episode the narrator, Chief Davis of Loz Anglis, closed with a typical hardass lecture:

So it was that this strange man who chose to lie under oath rather than testify against his paramour, found out too late the fact that the law cannot be trifled with. By perjuring himself Jim Walters played a losing game. And though it is too late for him to learn a lesson from it, perhaps you who are listening will realize the fact that the laws of the country were made to protect you. When you violate them, you are asking for just one thing. Trouble.

Suddenly struck me: He said the laws of the country were made to protect you.

Law enforcement types are always saying similar stuff, but 1937 was the single solitary year when this statement was LITERALLY TRUE.

Before 1908 the feds were insignificant compared to state and local authorities. The feds weren't protecting you and they weren't harassing you, unless you were in the Occupied South.

TR's progressives began both the protection and the harassment. Pure food and drug laws and labor laws protected ordinary people from some predatory capitalists, and Prohibition created the evil BATF that collaborated with gangsters to make life miserable for normal Americans.

Prohibition ended in 1934, removing the harassment. But the stock crash had proved we were still totally vulnerable to marauding capitalists. The securities laws of 1936 clamped down on the Wall Street Mafia.

So 1937 was the first year when the laws of this country were purely protecting us.

Didn't last. In 1938 Harry Anslinger used the "threat" of marijuana to rejuvenate the evil BATF and resume its usual collaboration and corruption and harassment. WW2 created vast new military and civilian bureaucracies, and after it ended those bureaucracies had to keep generating new wars and pseudowars to expand their turf and budget. Parkinson. Ratcheting, ratcheting, ratcheting. Tightening the screws a little more every year. Finally in 1999 the Securities Laws were repealed, removing all pretense of protection. Now we're besieged on all sides. By tyrannical bureaucracies, by drug gangs, by BATF, and most of all by the Wall Street gang.

= = = = =

Later: Noticed a "what's wrong with this picture?" I didn't mention WW1 as an expansionary factor because it didn't leave any permanent traces behind. But why didn't it? Along with the military expansion the feds created several huge bureaucracies like the Emergency Shipping Board and the US Food Administration. Both had massive infrastructure; the Shipping Board even built 'model cities' for its workers just as WPA did later. And both vanished without a trace after 1920. Why were they immune from Parkinson? Did Congress have an actual spine back then?
  ¶ 2:06 AM