Those efforts were largely focused on antitrust regulation, which is a different problem than the sorts of blue-sky securities problems that are more common in today's crypto space. But the reason I'm recommending reading about the earlier antitrust stuff, as opposed to the securities regulations that began to emerge a few decades later (which is more superficially topical), is that it marked the beginning of a phase transition in how the American public viewed the relationship between government and business. I think we're in the early part of another such phase transition today. Without the antitrust regulations that preceded them, subsequent securities regulations would likely have had a much steeper hill to climb in the court of public opinion.
Obviously we aren't going to be able to just copy+paste yesterday's regulations onto every newly emerging trend. But I think we can definitely draw lessons from how earlier types of regulations emerged and the ways that the government's relationship with capital interests was adjusted over time.
There were also downsides to the new regulations (like the coopting of the definition of "trust" to include unions as a means of curtailing the power of labor). Those are valuable lessons, too.
I say this as someone who is relatively pessimistic about the value that these new crypto constructs are going to be able to provide over the long term, but I'd make the same argument to crypto optimists, as well.
Apologies to the non-US folks; other countries have their own regulatory histories, some of which were well ahead of the times compared to America. But I'm less familiar with those.