The Ugly Laws

Front matter

SUSAN M. SCHWEIK

THE UGLY LAWS

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Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix

THE EMERGENCE OF THE UGLY LAWS Producing the Unsightly 23

AT THE UNSIGHTLY INTERSECTION

Preface

This bookhadits start during a talk at UC Berkeley by Tobin Siebers, the well-known scholar in (among other things) literary disability studies. Iwork as an English professor at Berkeley, where I have been one ofa group of scholars actively involved in developing an interdisciplinary disability studies program. We had invited Tobin to speak, and during the course ofhis lecture he briefly quoted the wording of the American ordinance (already very familiar to me) that is now my subject here. I felt the usual outrage, and allowed myself the usual shock, produced by invocations of the ugly words of “ugly law,” which, as I understood it, had prohibited “diseased, maimed, and deformed persons” from appearingin public. Then my disability studies colleague Fred Collignon, a professor of city and regional planning with a long history not only of academic work on disability policy but of experience in city government, leaned over and whispered to me, “Do you know, was that law ever actively enforced?” I didn’t know; it suddenly struck me as a problem that I didn’t. So I went to find out. This project emerged from the moment of that whispered question—an exchange between a city planner and a literary critic that in itself exemplifies some of the interdisciplinary range of disability studies.

The ugly laws are also known, somewhat more accurately, as “unsightly beggar ordinances.” The Ugly Laws tells the story of the figure of the “unsightly beggar” as he (and she) emerged across multiple forms of discourse and knowledge, particularly in the 1880s and 1890s. Like the so-called tramp, the subject ofa similar and interconnected cultural panic during the same period, unsightly beggars were “made up,” as Tim Cresswell puts it in his study of vagrants. Following Ian Hacking, Cresswell argues that tramps were more like gloves than horses, made up, that is, “like manufactured objects. . . . [T]he category ‘glove’ and the thing ‘glove’ emerged more or less simultaneously” (13). In part, this study concerns the making up of the unsightly beggar, who was produced from the same raw social material (the same political economy and material infrastructure) that generated the tramp.

I have also sought to examine this “glove” from another angle. In a 2004 speech, Jürgen Habermas, tracing some of the autobiographical roots of viii PREFACE his intellectual work, described his early childhood experiences of being born with a cleft palate, undergoing surgery in infancy, and dealing with social exclusion by his fellow schoolchildren because of his resultant speech impairment. These experiences, he argued, played a critical role in forming his thinking on the importance of public space and the political public sphere, subjects of crucial importance to an analysis of the ugly law. Meditating on “the deep-rooted reciprocal dependence of one person on the other” and the “intersubjective structure of the human mind,” Habermas, too, uses the image of a glove: “What I am getting at here is an image of subjectivity which you may imagine as a glove turned inside out to discern the structure of its fabric, a glove woven from the strands of intersubjectivity” (3). If the “unsightly beggar” of The Ugly Laws is like a glove, I have tried to make it like a glove turned inside out, scrutinized under the lenses offered by the disability movement, examined—to take up the enduring image offered by the title of one movement journal—at its ragged edge.

The strands I examine here are textual. In the course of research for this book, I have at times visited actual places—the house in Berkeley where mendicant writer Arthur Franklin Fuller published his autobiography of ugly law, certain still extant street corners in Chicago and Los Angeles marked as the turf for particular disabled beggars in 1894 or 1913. And I have interviewed real people—a judge in Omaha who encountered the last known “unsightly beggar” to be arrested (in 1974), disability activists today. But my general aim has been to interview a discourse; my subject is the discursive unsightly beggar.

“It’s hard to get real excited about winning the right to beg,” a New York City lawyer commented after winning a 1990 case, later overturned, that affirmed the right of panhandlers to beg in subways (Mitchell, 210). What follows is not a celebration of begging in any form. It is, however, an attempt to elucidate as fully as possible the mechanisms that create “unsightly beggars” and “unsightly persons,” in the hope that in the long run all vestiges of the culture of the American ugly laws will disappear.

When I ran an early version of this project by my friend Mark Limont, he told me about his experience as a kid “who walked funny and was stared at.” He described a childhood memory of seeing an obviously disabled man on the street and feeling fury and humiliation, wishing the man would go home and not embarrass him. “We all write our own ugly laws,” he said. “And then we have to write through them.”

What follows is my effort to write through ugly law.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks go to Carolyn Dinshaw and Janet Adelman, both of whom gave me encouragement at the earliest stages of this book. Lennard Davis and Simi Linton introduced me to disability studies when I came upon the bibliography they compiled for Radical Teacher in 1995, and they have been teaching me ever since. I owe Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Paul Longmore my deepest debt and gratitude, not only for their own invaluable work and for their critical help with mine but also for the models of intellectual integrity and generosity that they have provided. I am also indebted to every one of my fellow participants in the NEH-funded institute on disability studies in the humanities that Rosemarie and Paul organized.

This book was written in dialogue with three scholars and dear friends who read drafts of chapters, gave crucial suggestions, and offered critical advice: Deborah Clarke, Anne Finger, and Mark Sherry. I am immensely grateful for the extraordinarily generous guidance of readers of the entire manuscript: Douglas Baynton, G. Thomas Couser, Petra Kuppers, Barrett Watten, and the anonymous reviewers. Cathy Kudlick was my ideal reader; her unerring criticism made this book far better, even if it couldn’t turn me into a historian.

Many people at U.C. Berkeley have helped with this project. I am grateful to the faculty in the Berkeley English Department, particularly Ian Duncan, Mitch Breitweiser, Elizabeth Abel, Lyn Hejinian, and Stephen Goldsmith. Other colleagues at Berkeley who provided help at key moments include Janet Broughton, Daniel Boyarin, Dan Perlstein, Tim Clark, Marianne Constable, and all of the participants in the 2002 Townsend Center Initiative Grant Seminar. I would also like to acknowledge the steady assistance of the administrative staff members of the English Department, the Institute for Regional Development, and Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies.

I have been fortunate to collaborate with a group of faculty at Berkeley who by helping make disability studies happen created a vital intellectual context for my work here. Thanks to all of the members of Berkeley’s x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS disability studies advisory board, and in particular to Lawrence Cohen, Catherine Cole, Linda Krieger, Celeste Langan, Ray Lifchez, Jennifer Miller, Paul Rabinow, Steve Rosenbaum, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. I have benefited greatly from work with many people alert to disability issues on the Berkeley campus; special thanks to the librarians and oral historians at the Bancroft Library’s Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement project.

I would like to thank all of the scholars who participated in the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at U.C. Berkeley, especially the ones who commented in detail on parts of this book. I am also grateful to all of the participants in the Greater Bay Area Disability Studies Consortium, including Julia Epstein, Ruth Frankenberg and Mary Felstiner. My students in the disability studies courses I’ve taught over the years have helped enormously with the shaping and refining of this book. To the colleagues in disability studies whom I met first as my graduate students I am especially grateful. Special thanks to Dominika Bednarska, Gretchen Case, Rebekah Edwards, Michele Friedner, Hillary Gravendyk Burrill, Kris Loutensock, Anna Mollow, Paul Murphy, and Ariel Osterweis Scott. Ellen Samuels inspired and challenged me in many ways. I am one of the many people who owe Christine Hong a great debt for her kindness and the keen intelligence of her conversation.

Above all, I thank a group of U.C. Berkeley co-workers who created and sustained the structures within which I came to do this work. They have given me examples of engaged scholarship that have changed this book and changed my life. Fred Collignon’s influence will be obvious from the first page. Fred, Katherine Sherwood, Georgina Kleege, Devva Kasnitz, and Marsha Saxton: I can’t thank you enough.

Natalie Abbott, Melissa Cottrell, Juno deMelo, Rosa Martinez, and Charles Legere gave me indispensable research help. I was privileged to have Mike Ervin’s assistance with research in Chicago. Thanks also to Judge Walter Cropper for taking time to talk with me about the 1974 Omaha case. Emily Teplin and Simon Stern did their best to help me understand American law and legal citation, and I am also grateful for help provided by Dean Rowan.

All of us who work in disability studies know what a vibrant intellectual community we share in. I don’t have room to cite everyone who contributed to the making of this book, but here’s a beginning to the list of those I thank: Emily Abel, Ron Amundson, Michael Berube, Laurie Block, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Susan Burch, Brad Byrom, Lisa Cartwright, Eli

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

Clare, Michael Davidson, Jim Ferris, Lakshmi Fjord, Brigham Fordham, Carol Gill, Dan Gillette, Terry Galloway, Sander Gilman, Joseph Grigely, Kim Hall, Laura Hershey, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Alison Kafer, Steven Kurzman, Dennis Lang, Riva Lehrer, Victoria Ann Lewis, Kristin Lindgren, Lynn Manning, Leroy Moore, Neil Marcus, Paul Steven Miller, Sagit Mor, Corbett O’Toole, Katherine Ott, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, Stuart Murray, Ruth O’Brien, Martin Pernick, Penny Richards, William Roth, Harilynn Russo, Carrie Sandahl, David Serlin, Tom Shakespeare, Alice Sheppard, Russell Shuttleworth, Tobin Siebers, Sharon Snyder, Robin Stephens, Jean Stewart, Susan Squier. Thanks also to Rachel Adams, Jack Batterson, Bonnie Berry, Perry Duis, and Claire Sears for their scholarship and help. Without the work of Robert Burgdorf Jr. this book simply couldn’t exist.

These friends, among others, have supported and influenced this project, and I thank them with love and admiration: Ayse Agis, David Alpaugh, Evan Alpaugh, Lucy Blackmer, Phil Bolda, Ramsay Bell Breslin, Mary Lou Breslin, Elizabeth Flora, David Gilbert, Ray Grott, Jim Grow, Jenny Kern, Ralf Hotchkiss, Bob Holtermann, Suzanne Ingley, Denise Sherer Jacobson, Neil Jacobson, Debbie Kaplan, Scott Leubking, Mark Limont, Daphne Muse, Kalima Rose, Anthony Tusler, Dianne Walker, and my friends on McGee. I will always be grateful to Chris Taaffe, who saw this book through the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This work could not have been completed without the support provided by the University of California, U.C. Berkeley, and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. I am grateful to the National Institute for Disability Research and Rehabilitation for its support of Berkeley’s postdoctoral program in disability studies, which greatly enriched my understanding of the issues at stake in this book. Thanks also to the librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress, the Columbia University Rare Book Library, the New York Public Library, the Municipal Archives of New York, the New-York Historical Society, the Newberry Library, the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections, the Municipal Archive at Chicago City Hall, the Columbus Public Library, the Columbus Historical Society, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, the Ohio Historical Center Reading Room, the State Library of Ohio, the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland’s Special Collections, the Denver Public Library Department of Western History/Genealogy, the Denver Historical Society, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, the xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

New Orleans Historical Society, the Louisiana State Museum, the library at Tulane University, the Omaha Public Library, the Douglass County Historical Society, the California History Society, the San Francisco History Room at the San Francisco Public Library, the Buffalo Public Library Special Collections, the Buffalo Historical Society, the University at Buffalo Law Library, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Los Angeles City Archives, the California State Library, the Countway Library Rare Book Room at Harvard, the Motion Picture Archive at George Eastman House, and the Bancroft Library. Thanks especially to the Interlibrary Loan staff at UC Berkeley. I am grateful to NYU Press and particularly to Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, and Despina Papazoglou Gimbel.

Thanks with all my heart to my family, both Schweiks and Taaffes, for their love and support.

Some of the people to whom I owe deep thanks did not live to see this book’s completion: Nick Howe, who suggested the image on the cover; Harlan Hahn, Marian Scott-Hill, Judith Greenwood; and Jessie Alpaugh, the entirely beautiful.

Finally, I thank Emma McElroy for her patience over the years this book took to write and for the crucial ways in which she helped with the research. Most of all, I am grateful for the love and joy she has brought me.

For Emma

Don't fail to note the man behind the handicap!

Photograph from the “Cleveland Cripple Survey” of man driven off the streets of Cleveland by the unsightly beggar ordinance, circa 1916. (Welfare Federation of Cleveland, Education and Occupations of Cripples Juvenile and Adult: A Survey of All the Cripples of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916. New York: Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, 1918)

Introduction

In Cleveland, Ohio, sometime before 1916, the man whose photograph is on the facing page lost his job. He stands smiling in the photo, wearing white tie and newsboy’s cap, holding a stack of papers, a young man with clubbed hands and feet and a steady, confident gaze into the camera’s eye. A 1916 report by the “Committee on Cripples of the Welfare Federation of Cleveland” records the story of how this man sold newspapers until “the enforcement of a statute”! The statute in question was a version of the subject of this book: the ugly law. I think most readers will agree with me that this man’s ugliness is not obvious. In fact, he is notably a conventionally appealing person, full of pluck and charm.

A version of the statute that changed this man’s life appeared in Chicago decades earlier, in 1881. In the Chicago Tribune on May 19 of that year, an article announced that Alderman Peevey had prepared a new ordinance, one that he would submit to the Council that week. “Its object,’ wrote the Tribune, “is to abolish all street obstructions.” Peevey was on the Council’s West Side Streets and Alleys subcommittee, which dealt with matters such as sidewalk improvement and street widening, and the Tribune’s emphasis on “street obstruction” makes it sound at first as if the “ugliness” in question concerned inanimate objects, such as “piles of bricks.” But the street obstructions turn out to be human. A woman in 1881 Chicago had lost her job in a woolen-mill after being caught in a carding machine and injured. Attempting to support herself and her two children, she stood on the street, playing a hand organ. The ordinance, wrote the anonymous Tribune reporter, would “stamp” Alderman Peevey as a “public benefactor”: “He proposes to abolish the woman with two sick children who . . . grinds “Mollie Darling’ incessantly on a hurdy-gurdy on a street corner.’ Peevey’s ordinance passed, and Chicago ratified the American ugly law:

Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 [about $20 today] for each offense. (Chicago City Code 1881)

Peevey did not invent the wording of this ordinance. As city administrators commonly do, he looked for models, and these words were already available for the taking. Fourteen years earlier, in the earliest instance I have found, they show up in the code book of the young city of San Francisco. Just two years after the end of the Civil War, in July 1867, the San Francisco Morning Call reported the arrest of “a poor, half demented fellow, named Martin Oates,” a former Union soldier who had, “while in the field, been stricken down with paralysis, leaving him a perfect wreck.” Turned out of the army, Oates had landed on the streets and was taken into custody while San Francisco awaited the completion of its new almshouse (“Sad Sight”). A few weeks earlier, in anticipation of that almshouse, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had already passed a law that the Call described as an “order to prohibit street begging, and to prohibit certain persons from appearing in streets and public places” (“Board of Supervisors”). The certain persons in question were those like Martin Oates, “perfect wrecks,” or, in the words of the city, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed.” In San Francisco, significantly, the law was folded into a longer prohibition against begging in general.

Using more or less identical language, in the years that followed cities around the country passed or attempted to pass versions of the ordinance. Many versions of these statutes made clear in their titles that city leaders aimed the laws at a very particular target, the person who “exposed” disease, maiming, deformity, or mutilation for the purpose of begging. This book is about American ways of identifying, representing, knowing, correcting, and disciplining the “unsightly beggar”?

My aim is threefold: first, to provide a fuller account of the story of unsightly subjects than has yet been written; second, to rethink aspects of US. culture through the insights of disability theory (and in turn to rethink aspects of disability studies through an encounter with the history of the American ugly); and finally, to illuminate the conditions of disability—and municipal law’s constitution of those conditions—in the late nineteenth century and at the century’s turn, so as to better understand law, culture, and disability in the present. “Hidden and disregarded for too long,” disability theorist Simi Linton has written of disabled people, “we are demanding not only rights and equal opportunity, but we are demanding that the academy take on the nettlesome question of why we've been sequestered in the first place” (73). This book’s history of one dramatic legal effort to compel that sequestration takes on that question—and shows how intricately tied it is to other nettlesome American questions, local and national.

Ihave come to think that it was probably more the norm than the exception for this law to show up on the code books of American cities sometime in the nineteenth or very early twentieth century. As I noted, the first ugly law I have found appears surprisingly far west—San Francisco—and surprisingly early, in 1867. Portland, Oregon, passed a similar law, with different wording, a few months before Chicago's in 1881. The ordinance seems to have been welcomed particularly from the 1880s on in midwestern cities with strong, networked cultures of reform, towns bound to each other and the rest of the nation by railroad ties. In 1889, Denver and Lincoln passed ordinances more or less identical to Chicago’s and San Francisco’s, Omaha sometime between 1881 and 1890, Reno sometime before 1905. In the mid- 1890s, at the height of the worst economic depression in U.S. history to that date, an intense second wave of ugly laws appeared. Columbus enacted one in 1894. Northern cities also adopted or considered versions of ugly law. Pennsylvania passed a state version of the law. New Yorkers, inspired by Pennsylvania, made an unsuccessful attempt to pass a city ordinance in 189s. There is evidence that the law swept along the West Coast a little later, during a Progressive-era last gasp; Los Angeles considered passing one as late as 1913. Though as far as I know most southern cities did not pass the law, New Orleans had a statute very much in the spirit of the ugly law (though with significantly different language) as early as 1879, and its police began to enforce it strictly in 1883; at that time a local paper reported on the new get-tough policy with approval, emphasizing that it was “gratifying to know that New Orleans is aligning herself in this matter with other American cities” (“End to Street Begging”). This pattern—enactment, reenactment, crackdown, malaise—vexed all cities seeking reform through the ordinance. What most aligned them, in fact, as I show, were not the law’s successes but its failures, the impossibility of removing the unsightly in the form of persons.

In what follows I frequently refer to the “ugly law” in the singular. Doing so allows me to underscore a certain strong and unified project shared by and across various city cultures, involving both a judgment about bodily aesthetics and the use of law to repress the visibility of human diversity in social contexts associated with disability and poverty—what we might call the sighting/citing of the ugly. At the same time, though, the singular “ugly law” implies more coordination than occurred. The law(s) might be better thought of as a kind of civic contagion. The singular acknowledges local histories as aspects of a single outbreak; the plural reminds us of its multiple cases.

This contagion was, it has been argued, peculiarly American. So British scholar Stuart Murray suggests. “Disability disturbs,” writes Murray, “and it disturbs the sense of self in U.S. contexts in special ways,” since the American tendency to conform, always in sharp tension with ideologies of liberty, is threatened “by the ways in which disability offers its characteristically double movement: a seemingly anomalous and deviant version of humanity that nevertheless focuses all too uncomfortably for many on the central issues of the human condition.” Murray's proof is “the so-called ‘ugly laws’ that prohibited people with noticeable physical disabilities from visiting public spaces.”

The general impulses I describe here are in fact by no means limited to the United States (see McKinley; Kim; and Degener for recent examples in Eritrea, North Korea, and Germany); nor are they limited to the turn of the last century.’

In Murray’s England, back in 1729, a London merchant suggested whippings, workhouses and the establishment of a national institution for “receiving and strictly confining . . . People . . . who wander about to extort Money by exposing . . . dismal sights.” This included “creatures that go about the Streets to show their maim’d Limbs,’ as well as a wider group:

If any person is born with any Defect or Deformity, or maimed by Fire... or by any inveterate Distemper which renders them miserable Objects, their Way is open to London, where they have free Liberty of shewing their nauseous sights to terrify People, and force them to give Money to get rid of them. (Ribton-Turner, 187; Compton, 39)

Surely in this language of “miserable Objects,” “exposing,” “dismal,” and “nauseous sights,’ we find cultural seeds of later U.S. ugly law. CJ. Ribton-Turner’s expansive 1887 survey of English and European statutes concerning begging to that date provides many other examples, summarized compactly by Compton; indeed, Ribton-Turner’s “Index of the Principle Varieties of Beggars” begins, under the heading “Afflicted Classes,” with references to “Blind,” “Cripples,” “Deaf and Dumb,” and “Maimed,” among others. Though no English statute provided the exact template for the ugly law, English precursors existed, in scores. Again in Murray’s England, now in 2004, business owners in Plymouth were reassured by city officials in language that corresponds exactly to that of ugly laws, which were usually entitled “unsightly beggar ordinances”: “Any unsightly beggars are quickly removed from the City Centre” (Checkout). If, as Murray asserts, “disability disturbs, and it disturbs the sense of self in U.S. contexts in special ways,” those ways nonetheless have a distinct family resemblance to the behavior of English police, also in 2004, who banned a beggar who displayed a wound on his neck in Camden, issuing him an “Anti Social Behavior Order” that restrained him from reentering the town (Allen).

Murray is correct, however, in emphasizing the peculiarly American grain of this attempt to control the movement of disabled people in the US. city through the mechanism of this specific municipal ordinance. One of the most important foundations of the ugly law involves a specifically American socioeconomic determinant: the broad cultural emphasis on individualism, which enabled the law’s supporters to position disability and begging as individual problems rather than relating them to broader social inequalities. As Brad Byrom puts it, “The link between disability and dependency became a problem . . . as America became increasingly urban, increasingly industrial, and increasingly confident that the United States was unique in the nations of the world, a nation where wealth and prosperity existed for all who were willing to put forth hard work” (2004, 4). The absence of eventual development of a universal, socialized health and welfare system in the United States, the relatively high U.S. standard of living compared to poorer countries, and the specific conflation of disability, socioeconomic status, and race in the American context are other important factors in the American breeding ground and memory of ugly law.®

Americanness extends in this context to include the reach of U.S. imperialism. In 1902, under newly stabilized U.S. occupation, the Municipal Board of the city of Manila in the Philippines passed an unsightly beggar ordinance. “All ordinances shall be enacted in English and translated into Spanish,” a preface read, specifying that “the English text shall govern,’ so that even in Manila we find the distinctively American ugly law in its familiar cadence, “no person who is diseased” and so on (Ordinance No. 27, 1213). This was one of the very first ordinances enacted under U.S. military rule. Warwick Anderson has shown how the “distressed and assertive colonial culture” of U.S. officials sought to remake Filipino bodies, to fashion “an improved sanitary race out of the raw material found in the Philippine barrio,’ an elaborated project of hygiene reform, medico-moral uplift, and “uneven and shallow” Americanization (6, 1). The constitution of the unsightly beggar was part of this “technical discourse on bodily practice, mundane contact, and the banalities of custom and habit” that produced racialized abilities and colonial bodies in the Philippines (W. Anderson, 2). This example of ugly encroachment confirms, not complicates, Murray’s assertion of the ugly Americanness of ugly law.

“As late as the early 1970s,” Murray states, “some US states still had not repealed the so-called ‘ugly laws,” and although his emphasis on states rather than cities is inaccurate, his dating is correct. As far as I know, municipal enactments of the ugly law ceased by World War I, but the last documented arrest, astonishingly, happened in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1974. An Omaha policeman wanted to arrest a homeless man but had no basis for it. He combed the city code, found the ugly law still on the books, and took the man into custody on the grounds that he had “marks and scars on his body.’ Unsurprisingly, the arrest met with confusion and noncooperation by Omaha city prosecutors. “What’s the standard of ugliness?” inquired Judge Walter Cropper, both initiating and responding to a deep conflation of “disease, maiming and deformity” with the word “ugly.” “Who is ugly and who isn’t?” Cropper asked. “Does the law mean that every time my neighbor’s funny-looking kids ask for something I should have them arrested?” Assistant prosecutor Richard Epstein noted that criminal prosecution would require the impossible: courtroom proof “that someone is ugly” (Fogarty).

More surprising, perhaps, to some but not all of my readers, is the response by city prosecutor Gary Bucchino, who declined to file a charge against the man with marks and scars on his body but nonetheless affirmed that “the law is still active; the man just didn’t meet the qualifications in my judgment” (Fogarty). This was 1974, a year after amendments to the federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act had banned discrimination against disabled people and a mere three years before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued regulations to reinforce those amendments after unprecedented, militant pressure from disabled activists.

Those activists understood, of course, all the ways in which the naming and production of standards of perfection and beauty—and conversely, imperfection and ugliness—still operate and influence everyday interactions. Combating ugly law, they claimed powerful qualifications as persons “diseased, deformed, maimed and disfigured.’ “Spatial dissidents,” in Dorn’s terms, they insisted not only on exposing themselves to public view but also on occupying and radically reconfiguring public space. Such activists, and those who have come after them, have kept a version of the memory of the ordinance alive.

Citations of the statute, which usually call it the “ugly law” and often locate it in Chicago, constitute a staple feature in a wide variety of writing by disability theorists and organizers in the past thirty years.’ These references do not generally proceed to discuss the ordinance further, after quoting it; few take up questions about what motivated the law’s enactment, how the courts responded to the prohibition, or whether in fact it was ever enforced. Unmoored from its original context, the “Chicago, 1911” ordinance circulates today as both powerful rhetorical tool and literal urban legend—a legend about disability in the modern city. (A librarian of one Chicago archive still treats these legendary, oft-cited laws as if they were conventional urban legend; when approached, he says quite confidently that the ordinance is a myth. But his archives contain the ugly law’s traces, and those traces have become my texts.) This book is part of that history of activist citation of the ordinance; I speak to it and within it.