DHR Wayback - California Enacts Order 873
The First of America's "Ugly Laws" Officially Goes on the Books
Image Description: A judge’s gavel rests on its sound block, on a wooden tabletop.
Today’s DRH is a Wayback to July 9, 1867, when California passed the first of the American Ugly Laws. While these affected a variety of people, journalist Katie Dowd says:
“…there’s no question San Francisco did use Order No. 873 to incarcerate disabled individuals.”
The order in question made it an offense for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view.” The penalities for violating the order were hefty, including fines, up to a month in jail, or being put in an almshouse.
Once Order 873 was passed in San Fransisco, other similar orders quickly passed in Chicago, Denver, Omaha, Reno, and Portland. Ugly Laws provided a legal way to get those considered “sub-human” - disabled people, people of colour, poor people, anyone with a street business, other “objects of horror” - out of the public eye.
Case Studies
Ugly laws were as callous as they sound:
Martin Oates, a soldier who had become paralyzed while fighting in the Civil War, was the first to be arrested under Order 873. He was jailed because the almshouse wasn’t constructed yet.
In 1916, a Portland, Ore., woman called Mother Hastings was paid by the city to leave because she was “too terrible a sight for the children to see.” She took the money (I would have, too) and went to Los Angeles.
In 1915, a man in Indianapolis was arrested for being drunk and disorderly when he was actually having a seizure. He was released when a doctor vouched for him, saying that he’d read about his story in a local paper - on condition that he go live in Indiana’s Village for Epileptics.
Ugly Laws are linked to the developing eugenics movement of the time. Daniel Kelves talks in “Eugenics and Human Rights” about the once wide-held belief that “bad genes” caused poverty and criminality, and how people with either of those in their life were believed to be good candidates for sterilization. Grunge magazine talks about the implications of this:
“And because these sterilization laws primarily affected those in state institutions, they disproportionately affected minority groups, such as Black people and immigrants. As sterilization laws focused on what eugenicists believed were the "less visible disabilities that threatened future social order," ugly laws were used to simultaneously control society's outward appearance.”
The Demise of Ugly Laws
After the first World War ended, cities started to repeal their Ugly Laws, but it was a long process. The last arrest on record was in 1974, when police arrested a homeless man in Omaha because of his scars. He wasn’t charged, in the end.
However, despite the the ADA becoming law in 1990, remnants of the ugly laws still exist, particularly when disabled people have to deal with the police.
There is no reliable national database tracking how many people with disabilities, or who are experiencing episodes of mental illness, are shot by police each year, but studies show that the numbers are substantial—likely between one-third and one-half of total police killings. (2020)
Call to Action
Obviously there is much more work to be done on ensuring that disabled people are valued citizens in all ways, with full, safe access to our communities, if we’re really just crawling out from under the rock of these laws that wanted us off the street. What are the next steps?
I used these sources to research this article:
Black, Disabled, and At Risk: The Overlooked Problem of Police Violence Against Black Persons with Disabilities - Time Magazine
Kevles DJ. Eugenics and human rights. BMJ. 1999 Aug 14;319(7207):435-8. doi: 10.1136/bmj.319.7207.435. PMID: 10445929; PMCID: PMC1127045.
Made Perfect - Plough Website
San Fransisco once piloted America’s cruelest legislation: Ugly laws - SFGate
The Untold History of Ugly Laws - Grunge Magazine
Several of these reference Susan Marie Schweik’s 2009 book, The Ugly Laws.