Can anyone tell me how Prohibition used to work in Kansas? I do know that the Kansans adopted state prohibition in the early 1880s, and they kept it up long after Federal prohibition was repealed in 1933. According to a historical website, they finally repealed their state Prohibtion in 1948, after much debate.
But Truman Capote, in In Cold Blood, says that they were dry even then, in the early 1960s. I’ve also heard stories about how, around that time, the lounge car servers on the passenter trains would have to lock up the liquor and stop serving once they crossed the border into Kansas. I’ve even heard something about airlines not being allowed to serve while flying over Kansas; that might also have been in Capote’s book.
So what is the dope about Kansas Prohibition? Do they still have it? Or when did the last of it end?
I can’t speak to Kansas exactly but you can see that prohibition and strict alcohol regulations can be enacted on many levels. Counties and towns could have had strict ordinances left in place even after the state and federal prohibitions were removed. Maybe strict laws were passed in reaction to the state law change. States, counties, and towns all over the U.S. have various levels of alcohol controls and bans to this day. My home town has practically always been dry for example and that isn’t rare in certain states and regions.
I think Mississippi also had statewide Prohibition all the way into the 1960s, but the law had a clause that allowed cities and localities to “vote themselves out from under” it. By that time, most of them had done so.
The part about railroads is true. Kansas elected a grandstanding Attorney General named Vern Miller in 1970, and he forced Amtrak to serving liquor-by-the-drink within Kansas.
He seems to have expressed the opinion that he could force airlines to do likewise, but I can find no evidence that he actually attempted to do so, or that any airline complied with his wishes. Any attempt to enforce state law over airspace would be both impractical and constitutionally problematic, as Congress had declared “complete and exclusive national soveriegnty” over navigable airspace as far back as 1926. (Once an airplane lands in a state, of course, it’s a different story; Section Two of the Twenty-First Amendment grants states plenary power over importation of liquor, and most states require airlines which use their airports to have liquor licenses.)
I know that Alaska has a lot of dry towns and regions, because the indigenous people seem to be susceptible to alcoholism to a much greater extent than the newcomers. Barrow was bone-dry for some time, banning even private possession and consumption, but when last I looked I found that they do allow individuals to import alcohol for personal use, and issue licenses for that purpose.
My memory is that Miller did try to stop airlines from serving liquor-by-the-drink over Kansas, but I’ll be durned if I can remember the details, and I found nothing on it in a book that I thought might have something.
If I’m not mistaken, the Kansas Constitution still contains the phrase “The open saloon is hereby forever prohibited”. It’s a measure of what legislatures can do to work around such language.
The most recent wrinkle in Kansas law is to allow Sunday sales under local option.
Prohibition was passed by the 1879 legislature and passed by voters in 1880.