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Did you know it used to be illegal to be “ugly”?
And that these laws help lead to Freak Shows?
From the 1860s and into the 20th century many cities across the US had so called “Ugly
Laws” and if you were accused of violating them then you could, in fact, be arrested
for “ugliness.”
But these codes weren’t intended to judge people based on attractiveness (like a 19th
century Tinder), but actually a method of legal discrimination designed to keep people
who were differently abled, injured, destitute, or any combination of these categories off
of the streets and out of sight.
And although we think we’ve come a long way, the last case involving an ugly law was
in 1974, only 16 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law.
Yikes.
So how did this all arise?
Well our first question needs to be:
What are “Ugly Laws” and when were they first passed?
In her book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik traces the earliest
history of these laws in the US to 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War.
In San Francisco, a former Union soldier named Martin Oates was arrested, and then written
about in the San Francisco Morning Call which reported him as
"a half demented fellow, named Martin Oates,” who had “been stricken down with paralysis,
leaving him a perfect wreck.”
Schweik then notes that Oates was arrested and taken into custody while San Francisco
awaited the completion of its almshouse, or a place designed to charitably take in the
poor and destitute.
The law that was used to arrest Oates had been passed a few weeks earlier and called
for people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed” to be removed from
the streets or to be otherwise kept from public view and prohibited from begging.
But if you’re not allowed to be seen outside, then how can you get a job?
And if you can’t get a job, then how could you survive?
This was essentially the equivalent of a legal catch 22.
So that brings us to our second question:
Was there any way around this employment discrimination?
One of the weird loopholes of the ugly laws employment restrictions was that
a person could get around them if they had a disability and were shown in public
as part of a “demonstration.”
In her article “Disability and the Circus” Professor Rachel Adams notes that while “ugly
laws” prevented people with signs of visible difference from being seen in public, which
limited the kinds of jobs they could hold, sideshows were often ways for people to make
money to survive in the absence of a well sustained and corruption-free social safety net.
But these shows were frequently dehumanizing for the performers, and not every performer
was treated well or fairly compensated in the 19th century or early 20th century.
So we have a basic rundown on when these laws started to spring up and how they affected
people but our next question is:
Why were they getting passed?
Although the law made its first appearances in the US in 1867, Schweik traces these instances
all over the country, and each one seems to have language that is worse than the last.
And between 1880 and the 19 teens, cities and states across the country passed similar
laws, including Chicago, Portland, Denver, Lincoln, Omaha, Reno, Columbus Ohio, and the
state of Pennsylvania.
And New York and Los Angeles both attempted to pass ugly laws, even though they were ultimately
unsuccessful.
The period when we seek the spike in Ugly Laws and anti-beggary laws overlaps closely
with the period in US history known as the Progressive Era, which spanned from around
1890 through the 1920s.
And Ugly Laws arise as the result of local governments trying to force people into newly
constructed almshouses and sanitariums.
The Progressive Era was a marked by a push for greater social reform and anti-corruption
laws to combat the down sides of the Industrial Revolution, including poor health, urban poverty,
and rapid overpopulation in big cities.
Sounds almost too good to be true, right?
Well that’s because in a lot of ways it was.
Even though many Progressives wanted to fight government corruptions, many of the almshouses
and sanitariums that sprung up around this time were also rife with corruption of their own.
And lots of Ugly Laws sprung up as an excuse to arrest people and then move them into almshouses
or to barr those who wouldn’t or couldn’t go to almshouses and sanitariums from going outside.
And although enactment of these laws appears to have waned around World War I, the last
time an ugly law was used as a reason to arrest someone came in 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, when
a police officer wanted to arrest a homeless man and found the old law was still on the books.
Unsurprisingly this didn’t go down too well with the prosecutors who declined to throw
the metaphorical book at someone for an outdated law.
But, after decades of political pressure and organization by disability rights activists,
the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was signed into law by former President George
H.W. Bush.
Modelled after other laws that sought to guarantee the right to public space and access to equal
opportunity to all citizens (such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964) the ADA’s purpose is
to ensure that citizens with disabilities can have equal employment opportunities, fair
access to government services and programs, and that public spaces provide them with reasonable
accommodations.
And even after the ADA was passed in 1990, there’s still valuable work being done by
disability rights activists today to guarantee that all Americans continue to have increased
access to civil rights and all forms of public space.
So how does it all add up?
Well although the ugly laws have a colloquial name that makes them sound more like fiction
than fact to a modern viewers, they existed not so long ago and were designed as a form
of discrimination against a pretty wide range of people in the late 19th and early 20th century.
And although new “ugly laws” stopped getting written around World War 1, and were rarely
enforced after that point, they remained on the books in US cities like Omaha and Chicago
until 1974 before they were officially repealed.
So while this may seem like very far back history it’s actually more recent than you’d think.
So ugly laws: kind of funny name, not so funny history.
So what do you think?
Anything to add on why these relatively widespread laws aren’t well-known today?
Let me know down in the comments, be sure to follow Origin of Everything on Facebook,
Youtube, and Instagram, and we’ll see you next week!
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Hey guys!
Thanks for all of your comments and questions on our episode on the Jesus’ name being
a transliteration of Joshua!
Here’s what a few of you had to say!
David Shi on Youtube pointed out that Henry Liddell (the classics scholar from the 19th
century whose work I cited last week) was also the father of Alice Liddell.
Alice is probably most famously known as the namesake of Lewis Carroll’s children’s
book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Thanks for the fun fact David!
Lizette Pasohondo on Facebook pointed out that while she never thought that Christ was
Jesus’ last name, she did used to think that it was his middle name when she was a child.
That’s pretty funny since when I was younger, I only heard people say “Jesus H. Christ”
when they were annoyed and assumed that his middle name was “H”.
Thanks for watching and for sharing in the middle name debate Lizette!
Hoop Jeanne on Youtube has another fan pick for an episode on why the creation of peanut
butter is (maybe falsely) attributed to George Washington Carver.
This is also a good topic since I love peanut butter and researching stuff, and this may
give me the chance to unite my two greatest loves.
Thanks Hoop Jeanne aka “Hoop Jeanne it is” (just throwing out a new username suggestion
for ya)!
So that’s it for now and we’ll see you next week!