St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, May 6, 1910

…violation of the law which prohibits a person from publicly exhibiting a deformity. 

I did some Googling and came up with this Wikipedia page which states: 

From the late 1860s until the 1970s, several American cities had ugly laws that deemed it illegal for persons who were “unsightly” or “unseemly” to appear in public. Some of these laws were called unsightly beggar ordinances.

“Ugly laws” arose in the late nineteenth century in U.S. cities. During this period, urban spaces underwent a sharp influx of new residents, as both resident and immigrant populations were drawn to cities; their new populations were often impoverished, as, in the 1870s, the country underwent an economic downturn; and new residents were often veterans of the Civil War who were visibly disabled. This meant large numbers of people who were strangers to each other now occupied closer quarters than they had in small towns, where such local institutions as schools, families, and churches helped moderate social relations. In response to the pressures of condensed urban populations, local city councils attempted to regulate conduct on the streets using their law-making capacities. Ugly laws identified groups of people as disturbing the flow of public life and banned them from public spaces. Such people, deemed “unsightly” or “unseemly,” were usually impoverished and often beggars. Thus ugly laws were methods by which lawmakers attempted to remove the poor from sight.