Illegal to be ’ugly’? The history behind one of America‘s cruelest laws

Research has shown that beauty gives you a leg-up in relationships, school, and the workplace. But what if being considered unattractive wasn’t just a social hurdle but a criminal offense? From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, so-called “ugly laws” banned “unsightly” people from public places across the United States.

While we often hear about pretty privilege—the unearned advantages enjoyed by those who meet our culture’s beauty standards—this legislation took the consequences for not measuring up to a new extreme. Here’s what these little-known laws reveal about who our society considers beautiful and how they affected people who fell short of that ideal.

The rise of pretty privilege

As cities expanded and public spaces became more crowded, there was a growing emphasis on maintaining order and aesthetics in urban environments. San Francisco was the first city to make it a crime for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” to “expose himself or herself to public view” in 1867.

The legislation, which quickly spread to other cities and states—including Reno, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Pennsylvania—targeted people with visible disabilities. It was part of a larger effort to regulate public behavior and enforce social norms, often appearing alongside restrictions on racial integration, immigration, and vagrancy, according to Susan M. Schweik, author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.

Some justified the laws as a public health measure under the mistaken belief that seeing someone with a disability could literally make a healthy person sick. Others argued that allowing disabled people to beg for money made it too easy for pretenders to take advantage by faking a disability. The laws seem to have been most strongly motivated by revulsion.

Journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote in The Great Metropolis, his 1869 memoir of life in New York City, that “when you are on your way to dinner, or to visit your beloved, or have composed in your mind the last stanza of the new poem that has given you such trouble, it is not agreeable to be confronted by some loathsome vision.”

These laws cost some people their ability to earn a living. Disabled street vendors, panhandlers, and performers were forced out of work because their presence disrupted public enjoyment of urban spaces.

For instance, in the mid-1910s, a 35-year-old Cleveland man with clubbed hands and feet had to give up his job selling newspapers due to the law. He struggled to support himself and his family until a local drug store owner permitted him to sell from the shop’s front stoop so he would be on private, rather than municipal, property.

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“Helen Keller and FDR [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] weren’t the law’s targets,” says Schweik. “Its most obvious function was to prevent or discourage people with visible disabilities from being in public space asking people for money.”

Some of the laws’ supporters believed that if disabled people were moved from the streets into institutions, they would receive better care. This approach, however, only led to further marginalization by stripping disabled individuals of their right to self-determination and isolating them from the rest of society.

Not everyone supported the ugly laws. Some mayors began issuing peddling permits specifically to people with disabilities to protect their income, and bystanders would often intervene when police attempted an arrest, making enforcement challenging.

For example, in 1936, when a Chicago police officer attempted to arrest Ben Lewis, a Black amputee, by kicking his good leg out from under him, four white onlookers attacked the policeman while hundreds of others rallied around them.

Ugly laws’ lasting impact

While the ugly laws themselves are no longer in effect—the last recorded arrest related to an ugly law was in 1974, under an Omaha, Nebraska, ordinance—their legacy continues to influence attitudes toward disability and public space.

(Here’s how the Americans with Disabilities Act transformed a country.)

“Instead of public ugly laws, cities now have sleek sidewalk management plans to prevent or deter acts by some people that some other people think are not a good look, like standing too long too noticeably on the street, or sitting there, or sleeping, or having stuff, or being obviously in too much need,” says Schweik.

The ugly laws, however, also had a positive outcome. Disability advocates in the 1970s used the laws as a shocking example of discrimination that demonstrated their need for civil rights protections. Their activism led to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which requires businesses and governments to provide disability accommodations.