The "Hot Type, Hard Times, 1900-1910" exhibit opens a window on the city's frontier past and the decade when civilization finally took root in Idaho Falls. Detailing the struggle waged for control of City Hall by saloonkeepers, bootleggers and gamblers against a reform movement led by two groups bent on civilizing the town.
The first decade of the 20th century was a technology-driven period of sweeping social change in Idaho Falls. In the middle of the decency fight were the town's three newspapers - the staid Republican Idaho Register, the Idaho Falls Times backing the reform candidate, and a brash pro-labor newcomer, the Daily Post.
Items in the exhibit include a working model of an 1870s-era printing press, called a clamshell jobber. Book publisher Graham Whipple will demonstrate the foot-powered press on occasion during the two-month exhibit. A 1905-era automated typesetting machine called a Linotype is also on display.
The exhibit also features a revealing collection of vintage Idaho Falls postcards showing how the town looked during the 1900-1910 era, loaned for the exhibit by local collector Myron Curtis.
Another display shows a life-size re-creation of the Idaho Register's composing room of around 1903.
In its earliest days, most of the town's operating budget came from fees and taxes paid by saloons and the town's first industry, a brewery. Saloonkeepers felt they had a proprietary interest in the town and pretty much had things their way, with saloons open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and few, if any, restrictions on bootlegging, gambling or prostitution. An initial effort to restrict saloon hours was met with strong resistance and failed.
By 1900, Idaho Falls was still a place of wooden boardwalks and muddy, unpaved streets, woodframe storefronts and sagebrush-choked back alleys. As the century dawned, the town had no lights, no central sewer system and poor water pressure, putting the wood-frame buildings in mortal danger of fires. Prostitutes plied their trade openly from shacks along the river.
A group of the town's matrons - the mayor's wife, the newspaper publisher's wife, an influential female banker and Baptist missionary -
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formed the Village Improvement Society to clean things up.
But the V.I.S. didn't just pick up the trash and plant a few trees and flowers; the group bought the rocky outcroppings along the Snake River from the city for $1, then razed the shacks where prostitutes had set up shop and sent them packing.
It didn't solve the problem; the brothels simply relocated downtown, and by 1904 the city was obliged to set up a "restricted district" for the so-called "obnoxious element." A disastrous 1904 fire burned more than 20 downtown businesses, including the restricted district. But the town rebuilt.
By 1907, citizens had had enough. An announcement in the Times proclaimed the formation of the Civic League of Idaho Falls, backing D.G. Platt as the reform candidate for mayor.
"It is well-known that an enormous corruption fund has been collected for the saloons, breweries, gamblers, and the immoral contingent on the river front," the league proclaimed on March 5, 1907. "Two newspapers have already been subsidized to do the bidding of the Morplots in the personal abuse of respectable citizens," the League accused in the Times.
The town's first resident lawman, Ed F. Winn, was a victim of the political infighting of the day. Winn had been appointed postmaster in 1901 by President Theodore Roosevelt but was accused by the reformers of tampering with a letter sent by their candidate, Platt. Even though the charges later proved spurious, the appearance of impropriety was enough to block Winn's reappointment.
The Civic League labeled Charles Sumner's Post as "the major organ of the so-called Progressive Party" and questioned the Republican purity of the Register. Though the Times repeatedly claimed that the Civic League was "not a political party," when Platt won, he immediately appointed a new police chief and officers, along with several other city posts, and the Times was made the official paper of the city.
By the end of the decade, the town had completed water and sewer systems, improved its fire protection and enlarged the city's electrical grid. For the first time, Idaho Falls was a city with improved law enforcement and paved, well-lighted streets. The reformers had won.
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