The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public

5. Dissimulations

THE L AW IN L ANGUAGE 103 as an “anti-freak law” (Ringenbach, 99). It is hard to say who might have been hurt more by the conflation at work here of the beggar and the freak, the beggar whose requests for help were converted into carnival spiel or the freak-show performer whose stage work was translated into whines for alms. Both were reduced to examples of disgusting bodily display.38 Of course, helping, not hurting, was the stated aim; but poor people have often been crushed in the name of reform. The freak and the unsightly beggar are by no means identical, despite legislative efforts like these that attempted to render them equivalent. Unsightly beggars were less disciplined than freak performers, and arguably more abject. Beggars played on pity for their plights, but “‘pity’ as a mode of presentation was absent” in the freak show, argues Bogdan: “Pity did not fit in with the world of amusement” (277). Beggars were usually closer to being their own bosses in the petty street economy, but they were also closer to bare life (one can die of exposure but not of exhibition). The borders between the two were indeed sometimes porous. Nickell describes sighting a subject of his research on sideshows, “El Hoppo the Living Frog Boy,” in his wheelchair selling newspapers on the street, and being told by a “showman” that El Hoppo was “just some poor unfortunate . . . picked off the street and created on the spot” for a one-time exhibition (147). But the unsightly beggar plays a very different social and cultural role than that of the freak. Freaks might in rare cases achieve star status. At the same time, the freak was governed by placement in/as spectacle. The conventions of the freak show, however tiny and seedy a show, dictate, as Susan Stewart notes, that spatially “the viewer of the spectacle is absolutely aware of the distance between self” and viewed and that “the spectacle exists in silence. . . . there is no dialogue—only the frame of the pitchman or the barker” (108–109). Freaks act as “effigies,” in Roach’s terms: “performed effigies—those fabricated from human bodies and the associations they evoke—provide communities with a method of perpetuating themselves through specially nominated mediums or surrogates: among them, actors, dancers, priests, street maskers, statesmen, celebrities, freaks” (1996, 36). Surrogates for no one, beggars could not be effigies. By no stretch of the imagination did they function as specially nominated mediums for the broader community. If they performed (and the next chapter will show how thoroughly the unsightly beggar was made up out of, made up by, performance), they nonetheless did not perform visibly, formally, theatrically, enough.39 They were not contained by what Bill Brown terms “the amusement/knowledge system that translates a phenomenon into a freak” (244). 104 THE LAW IN LANGUAGE In the case of both antifreak law and ugly law, cities solidified their legal municipal cultures, what we might call their cultures of civicness, by regulating and suppressing displays of anomalous bodies too far outside civil norms and forms. As the references to indecency in the act that I quoted earlier suggest, proponents justified these efforts as guarantees of an appropriate urban culture. Suppression of unsightly beggars was one way to secure the decency of the modern urban polis. DISSIPATIONS In 1919, one disabled vagrant, a man who had traveled the country over many years and had a firsthand sense of exactly where and when city leaders cracked down on unsightly begging, made this observation: “During the past 17 years I have noticed that where there was booze, a red light district, gambling—a ‘wide-open’ town, usually the cripples and blind were not interfered with, but helped. When we get a spell of reform, we get a hard sanctimoniousness” (Fuller 1919, 62). As is often the case, Arthur Franklin Fuller (whose writing I discuss in chapter 11) turns out to be a reliable witness . The history of the unsightly beggar ordinances is indeed closely connected to the history of municipal regulation and prohibition of alcohol, not just because both emerge when “spells of reform” reflect civic willingness to police a broadening range of behavior but because a great deal of the time “so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” turns out to mean “so as to be (or seem) inebriated.”40 A reporter on the city court beat in Louisville put it succinctly in 1884: “Such a helpless cripple...