What were the ‘laws of ugliness’, rules used by the US to criminalize and pursue poor and people with disabilities

Just two years after the end of the civil war, several US cities began approving decrees prohibiting the presence of ‘sick, mutilated or deformed’ on the streets. Getty Images via BBC “It is better to be beautiful than good”. When Irish poet and writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) pronounced this sentence, it seems that he was thinking in the United States of his day. ✅ Click here to follow the G1 international news channel on WhatsApp during the second half of the 19th century, several cities, and at least one US state promulgated a series of laws that made it a crime not having certain physical characteristics or other characteristics that were against the predominant aesthetics of the time. Over time, these controversial regulations, which included fines and prison sentences, became known as “laws of ugliness.” Hiding the ‘unpleasant’ the purpose of the so -called ‘laws of ugliness’ was to keep the indigents and the poor outside the growing cities. Getty Images via BBC “The so -called ‘ugliness laws’ were a series of municipal decrees that prohibited the presence of people with certain physical characteristics in public places,” Mundo Susan Schweik, Dean of Arts and Humanities at Berkeley. The first of these regulations was approved in the city of San Francisco in 1867, added the American teacher, who conducted an exhaustive study of these regulations for her book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (the laws of ugliness: public disability). The Californian City Ordinance criminalized any “sick, mutilated or deformed person in some way to become a disgusting or repulsive object” seen in the streets, squares, parks and other public places. Over the years, cities such as Reno (Nevada), Portland (Oregon), Lincoln (Nebraska), Columbus (Ohio), Chicago (Illinois), New Orleans (Louisiana) or the state of Pennsylvania copied the spirit and lyrics of the text dictated in San Francisco. In the case of Chicago, one of the last cities approving such regulation in 1916, the argument presented by local authorities was to “remove” all “ugliness from the streets,” the local newspaper said. “It seems that the ‘ugliness’ in question referred to inanimate objects, such as piles of bricks, but the obstructions they sought to eradicate were human,” added Schweik. The civil war left thousands of injuries and mutilated, although several of the ‘laws of ugliness’ have excluded these veterans from their provisions. James Gardner/Buyenlarge/Getty Images via BBC at the time, some justified measures as a way to control disease and protect public health. “The ‘maternal influence’ thesis suggested that if a pregnant woman saw someone sick, mutilated or deformed, she would be so impressed that her baby could be born sick,” he explained. Proof of this belief can be found in the text published in 1906 by American cleric Charles Henderson. “The epileptic is an object of terror, and no one who has witnessed a convulsing person can escape the haunting memory of the spectacle and completely free his mind from terror or aversion,” he wrote as he supports measures to isolate “undesirable.” The rules not only prohibited begging, but also prevented the disabled from getting involved in street arts or street vendors. Getty Images via BBC in the postwar period for Schweik, the fact that these laws began to pass two years after the end of the civil war (1861-1865), which left thousands of injuries and mutilated across the country, it was not by chance. “San Francisco was a city that was undergoing an urban shock, recovering from the peak and the fall of the gold race, and lived a great multinational migration, especially from China. The streets were full of difficult people,” she said. A striking element is that many of these “witch laws” have been supported by charity organizations. “These rules have been used to institutionalize people considered disgusting,” Mundo Raquel Mangual, a researcher at the Temple University deficiencies institute, told BBC. The various rules provided penalties such as fines and prison for “sick, mutilated or deformed” people who were exposed to the public. “The consequence was that the people to which these ‘laws’ were applied were forced to enter nursing homes or houses of charity. And that was an unofficial sentence of life imprisonment,” said Schweik. Experts claim that the ‘laws of ugliness’ were not directed against people like Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down due to polio, but were collateral damage. Getty Images via BBC The poor were the target although the “laws of ugliness” seemed to have the purpose of pursuing certain groups for their aesthetics, or for the lack of it, the experts consulted indicated that they actually had a different purpose. “These rules had very little to do with physical attractiveness and were used to get people with disabilities out, homeless or suffering from diseases such as epilepsy,” Mangual explained. Guy Caruso, an expert on intellectual and developmental disabilities, spoke in similar terms. “Homeless people, disabled or mutilated were mostly poor who had to be begged to survive and people were repulsed by seeing them on the streets,” said the Temple University professor. But the ordinances not only sought to hide people considered “unpleasant or disgusting”, prohibiting them from being on streets, squares or parks, but also made their livelihood difficult, prohibiting them from requesting alms. In the 19th century, deformed people were believed to affect public health. Getty Images via BBC The Chicago Rule, for example, foreseeing fines of $ 1 (more than $ 100 in current values) for each infraction for a “sick, mutilated or deformed” person displayed in public places. Not only were homeless people affected, but also those who were dedicated to street sale or street arts. In his book, Schweik cites a case in Cleveland in 1910. A man with injured hands and feet, who sold newspapers on the public streets, was banned by the authorities to continue his activity, because they considered it not to work for a “crippled”. Years later, Portland police told a woman, known as “Mother Hastings”, who also sold newspapers on the streets, that she was “too terrible vision for children to see” and gave her two options: going to a farm or another city. The woman went to Los Angeles and married another person with disabilities, according to information found by the investigator. Opening the doors for discrimination although the number of people to which the rules were applied is unknown, as neither the police nor the courts maintained records, the experts consulted said their impact transcended the victims. “These laws were part of a set that intertwined with a group of laws that emerged in the late 19th century, who sought to control the kind of people who wanted to allow themselves in public spaces,” said Schweik. The expert claimed that the ordinances ended up being connected to the laws of racial segregation approved in the southern US. Mangual said the instruments also opened the doors for eugenic legislation passed by some states of the country in the late 19th century. “These laws facilitated the approval of other laws authorizing the sterilization of people with disabilities or mental diseases to eradicate these groups,” he added. Schweik admitted that the “laws of ugliness” served to discriminate against people with disabilities, but clarified that this was not their main goal. “I often say that (former president) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) was not the target of these rules. The main target was poor people,” he insisted. In 1921, at the age of 39, Roosevelt suffered from polio, a disease that paralyzed him from the waist down and forced him to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. However, his condition was hidden and, in certain public events, he used crutches and other devices to stand up. Dead, but not forgotten with the arrival of the 20th century, the application of the “laws of ugliness” became quite unusual. However, they were not revoked until the 1970s, thanks to the pressure of the movement for the rights of the disabled. “In 1970, in the city of Omaha (Nebraska), a policeman wanted to arrest a homeless, but had no reason to do so, because the man was not asking alms, drunk or disorder. “A judge rejected the policeman’s allegation, saying, ‘Should I allow my neighbor’s children to be arrested if they are ugly? A local newspaper has published the story, and groups of activists began to organize to demand the revocation of the rule,” he continued. “By the way, the headline used by the newspaper: ‘Legal Law only punishes the ugly’ is why we know these instruments today as ‘laws of ugliness’. This, despite the fact that the ugly word does not appear in any of them,” he concluded. And while not all cities have revoked their laws, the approval of the Americans with disabilities (ADA) by the US Congress in 1990 made them ineffective in practice. ADA prohibits any kind of discrimination against people with physical or intellectual disabilities. Despite the official revocation of the rules, experts say the consequences were not overcome. “The spirit of these laws is still rooted in the subconscious of people and institutions and this is seen in the way people with disabilities are treated today, as they are still seen as if they were children,” said Mangual. Schweik also stated that “the culture of the ‘laws of ugliness’ is still very alive” and said that current US president Donald Trump is one of those that contributed to it. “Trump forged his political career in the early 1990s campaigning against the homeless and disabled in the tributary fifth Avenue of New York, which made him resent because that ‘degraded’ the area around Trump Tower,” he recalled. “Today, instead of decrees, cities are using more subtle ways to keep people away from others, such as the installation of banks and other street furniture in squares and subway or train stations that prevent beggars from staying for a long time or sleeping in these places,” he said.

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