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On the subject of Council by District, it seems that several folks are a tad misinformed. True, there was graft, corruption and the wholesale selling of votes and favors. In fact, in 1914, one of the first uses of a wire recorder was used to capture several aldermen selling their votes right inside the old City Hall's Council Chambers.
The playback was inaudible and the prosecutions case fell apart. No one was convicted.
However, the drama of that corruption case, pales in comparison to the real reason behind the move to At-Large representation.
Around the turn of last century, there was a massive influx of Poles, Hungarians and worst of all: Germans. Germans had the particular bad habit of being pretty organized. They organized in beer gardens within their enclaves on the eastside. They spoke their own language, had their own newspaper [[Deutcher Abend Post which is still the USA's largest German language paper now called the Abend Post I believe) and were thriving in commerce and political power.
WWI comes along and German's aren't the most popular with their secret beirgardens and closeknit enclaves. Toss in Carrie Nation and her anti-drinking shrews, sprinkle in Women's Suffrage and you get a huge wave of discontent within the Nativist community.
The Germans, again in their cleverness, formed voting blocks within their Eastern European brethren. Pollocks, Krauts and Honkies all sharing the City's spoils of jobs and resources. The Nativists, fearing their power waning, devised the At-Large system to not just clean-up corruption, but to break the powerblocks of the Aryans.
So, before we get all freaky about corruption, keep in mind we are the only city in America with a population more than a half million that doesn't have a District system, and remember that the main push to ban district representation was rooted in the distrust for a people we were at war with.