From a reader:
Jonah,
Reading LF this morning over breakfast you answered what has been a
mystery since my childhood. As a kid I used to watch The Little
Rascals, and I always wondered about the Our Gang reaction to
surreptitious looking men in trench coats and fedoras, which was
always something along the line of “ooooohhh, are you a G-man?” In
other episodes when they wanted to intimidate adults they would dress
up as a “G-man,” with one boy on another’s shoulders and covered in a
trench coat. What the hell were these G-men, I wondered. Why were
they dressed in spy-garb? Who were these G-men that apparently lurked
the streets of America under cover? Cripes, now I know.