Jackbooted Feds

Talk about overreach:

"During the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions at a Massachusetts seaport. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor."

"Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular jails of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. The town itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence."

Secret prisons, like Gitmo?  Destruction of private property without due process?  Disappearing US citizens without trial?  All for the War on Booze.  What bureaucrat from the Coolidge administration could craft such a policy, for the love of King Phillip!  Smacks of Waco.