When it comes to red-letter dates in American history, Jan. 15 certainly stands out.

Notables born on this day included Mathew Brady (born 1823), often referred to as the father of photojournalism who is best known for his Civil War photography; Edward Teller (1908), the Hungarian-born U.S. physicist known as the “Father of the H-bomb; and Martin Luther King Jr., the Atlanta-born Baptist minister and activist who became the leader in the civil rights movement.

At the time of King’s birth in 1929, the U.S. was in the midst of a great social experiment against alcohol known as Prohibition. Temperance women saw drinking as a destructive force in families and marriages and formed societies in the mid-1800s. By the early 1900s, they were fixtures in communities.

Exactly nine years before King’s birth, America’s Dry Law went into effect, which made the selling of liquor and beer in America illegal. The original intent of Prohibition was to lower crime and corruption, defuse social problems, lower taxes needed to support prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene.

Instead, the nation experienced a rise of criminal activity associated with bootlegging, a corruption of police and public officials and courts and prisons systems being overloaded. Al Capone built an empire largely on profits from illegal alcohol which earned the Chicago crime boss about $60 million annually.

There were loopholes to the law. Booze was smuggled into the country on “rumrunner” ships, produced in illegal distilleries, breweries and bathtubs and sold in illicit saloons known as speak-easies.

New York City had 15,000 legal saloons before Prohibition, but the Dry Law spawned some 32,000 speak-easies.

Because Prohibition banned only the manufacture, sale and transport, but not possession or consumption of alcohol, some people and institutions who had bought or made liquor before the Dry Law were able to continue to serve it throughout the Prohibition period legally.

Whiskey could also be obtained by prescription from medical doctors. Although the labels warned that it was strictly for medicinal purposes, doctors were writing prescriptions and pharmacies filling them without question, so the number of “patients” increased dramatically.

One of the many “patients” was an uncle of mine who lived in northeastern Pennsylvania. I have a doctor’s Prohibition Act certificate, issued to a pharmacy in his hometown, that allowed my uncle to have a tablespoon of Frumenti — the pharmaceutical term for whiskey — three times a day. There was no attempt to close this loophole. Over a million gallons of booze were consumed per year through these freely given prescriptions.

Even prominent citizens and politicians admitted using alcohol during Prohibition. Even though he had voted for Prohibition while an Ohio senator, President Warren Harding kept the White House well-stocked with bootleg liquor.

Prohibition remained the law of the land for 13 years and 10 months until Congress adopted a resolution proposing a 21st Amendment to the Constitution in 1933.

Thousands cheered in New York’s Times Square when an electric sign announced “Prohibition is dead!”

“A thousand bartenders reached in unison for the scotch, rye or gin,” wrote reporter John Lardner, “and 50,000 customers bumped elbows for the honor of absorbing the first legal drink.”

Another writer summed it up best when he said that “Prohibition is incontrovertible proof that you don’t have to be drunk to come up with a really, really bad idea.”

One of the positives from the bootleg/moonshine era was its influence in stock car racing. At NASCAR’s first official race in 1949, most of the drivers had learned their craft hauling whiskey in the southern Appalachians.

Moonshiners souped up their cars so they could outrun federal “revenuers” on twisty mountain roads and, in the 1940s, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing began organizing races on dirt tracks, sowing the seeds for what became today’s major spectator sport.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com