The Emperor Norton National Fame Accelerator of 1875
A Synopsis of the Emperor in a New York Magazine Went Viral, 1870s-Style
WORD OF EMPEROR NORTON started spreading across the country almost immediately.
Indeed, it appears that the first newspaper mention of the Emperor outside of California was a reprint of Joshua Norton’s original Proclamation of 17 September 1859 that ran a month later, October 19th, on the front page of the Vicksburg (Miss.) Weekly Whig — of all places.
Here’s how the Mississippi editor introduced the Proclamation:
Editorial introduction to reprint of Joshua Norton’s 17 September 1859 Proclamation declaring himself Emperor of the United States, Vicksburg (Miss.) Weekly Whig, 19 October 1859, p. 1. Source: Newspapers.com
The Vicksburg reprint was not a harbinger of any particularly robust interest in Emperor Norton from newspapers outside his adopted state. Over the next 20-plus years, until the Emperor’s death in January 1880, papers in California and — at a very distant second — Nevada provided nearly all of the published coverage of the Emp.
A review of Genealogy Bank and Newspapers.com — two of the largest digital databases of historical newspapers covering the United States — indicates that papers outside California and Nevada featured or mentioned Emperor Norton in only
About 15 items from 1859 through 1865;
Some 20 more items from 1866 through 1870; and
Another 50 or so items from 1871 through 1879.
So. while, over the period of Emperor Norton’s 20-plus-year reign, there was a small uptick of interest in the Emperor from newspapers outside California and Nevada — especially after 1870 — there still were fewer than 100 items mentioning the Emperor across those 20 years.
That’s fewer than 100 items, fewer than 5 per year, for the entire country outside California and Nevada.
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MUCH OF the 1859–1880 coverage of Emperor Norton for non-California audiences was courtesy of Pacific Coast correspondents from newspapers in the East and Midwest who filed their reports and observations in the form of columns that were published under titles like “Letter from California” and “Letter from San Francisco.”
But, it appears that…
Some 40 percent of the total coverage of the Emperor published by papers outside California and Nevada during this 20-year period is down to contemporaneous reprints of just TWO items.
Neither of these items was the report of someone on assignment as a staff correspondent from a newspaper outside the state — but, both did originate in San Francisco.
The first is from…
SEPTEMBER 1864
Boston-born Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882) was an influential Unitarian minister in New York who — among many other things — co-founded the Christian Inquirer, the weekly paper of the Unitarian Association of New York, in 1846. Bellows edited the Christian Inquirer for a decade or so.
Bellows was a friend of Thomas Starr King (1824–1864), the minister at the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco — and, when Starr King died in March 1864, Bellows came to San Francisco in May 1864 to be the interim minister at First Unitarian and to help the church find its next minister, Horatio Stebbins.
Bellows was in San Francisco for four months. In September 1864, towards the end of his stay, he penned a column, “The Idiosyncracies of San Francisco,” that was published in his old weekly, the Christian Inquirer.
In this column, Bellows calls the Emperor
“the Emperor Norton, king of all the Chinese," who issues pompous proclamations in English, himself a European, with more hair on the end of his nose than all Chinadom has on its chin, who goes about in filthy regimentals, with immense epaulets, and lugging what John Bunyan would surely accept as a "grievous crab tree cudgel."
The column was reprinted in some 10 papers — including in Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin.
If Bellows’ characterization of the Emperor sounds racist: In the same column, Bellows marvels at
the brownness of the audiences in Platt's Hall, which looks as though one of these great sand hills had been inverted like a huge pepper-box over them.
No doubt, Mr. Bellows meant well. But, his editorial farewell to San Francisco does rather lead one to suppose that he left the city as 50, sheltered, and white as when he arrived.
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THE FOLLOWING year, 1865, another New Yorker arrived in San Francisco. This one would stay.
Born in Utica, N.Y., Samuel Williams (1827–1881) graduated from Williams College in 1851 and honed his journalistic skills at the Utica Herald and the Albany Evening Journal before moving to San Francisco to join the staff of the Daily Evening Bulletin — where he remained until shortly before his death.
This brings us close to the second of the two nationally reprinted descriptions of Emperor Norton that I mentioned earlier — this one originally published in…
JULY 1875
A decade into his tenure at the Bulletin, Williams penned a seminal 20-page article about San Francisco — its climate (barometric and social), progress, and ambitions — for the New York-based Scribner’s Monthly. The article, “The City of the Golden Gate,” was published in Scribner’s July 1875 number.
Cover of Scribner’s Monthly, V10 N3, July 1875. (Note that the “Kearny” depicted here is U.S. Army officer Philip Kearny (1815–1862), not (a) Stephen W. Kearny (1794–1848), also a U.S. Army officer and the namesake of San Francisco’s Kearny Street, or (b) Denis Kearney (1847–1907) — with an extra “e” — the Irish-American anti-Chinese demagogue of San Francisco. Source: Hathi Trust
Williams’ negative portrayal of the Chinese is of the zeitgeist of 1870s America. But, on the whole, his journalistic “State of the City” is even-handed, if — with the zeal of the convert — a little overindulgent in the beatific boosterism that seems to have been a feature of San Francisco from its earliest days.
Unlike Henry Bellows, who wasn’t in the city for long enough to keep from describing it as a tourist would, Williams, at the 10-year mark, is a fully participating resident who both (a) is a more attuned observer and (b) is better able to allow San Francisco to speak for itself without his judging it too much.
This shows in Williams’ more empathetic depiction of Emperor Norton, the only San Francisco-historical figure besides James Lick to merit an engraved illustration in the published version of his article.
The one-paragraph description of the Emperor is at the top of the left column, below:
Excerpt from Samuel Williams’ article, “The City of the Golden Gate,” Scribner’s Monthly, V10 N3, July 1875, p. 275 — including one-paragraph description of Emperor Norton starting at the top of the left column. Source: Hathi Trust
A database search indicates that a few other passages from Williams’ article were excerpted and reprinted in newspapers across the country — but not in more than a couple of papers for any given passage.
The Emperor Norton passage was excerpted and reprinted no less than 26 newspapers in 10 states (complete listing following the end of this article).
This amounts to between roughly 20 and 25 percent of all the newspaper mentions of the Emperor outside California and Nevada in the 20-year period of his reign — by far, the most widely broadcast single piece of national coverage of Emperor Norton between Joshua’s declaration of 1859 and the Emperor’s death in 1880.
One question to ask:
In promoting its July 1875 issue to editors, did the publisher of Scribner’s Monthly flag Samuel Williams’ description of Emperor Norton as one of the most quotable passages of the entire 20-page article?
Or: Did a certain newspaper editor find his own way to the passage — and was his unprompted reprinting of the passage what enabled other editors to see it and decide that they, too, would like to flavor their columns with a succinct portrait of the Emp?
Put another way: Was the excerpting and reprinting of the Norton description an entirely organic, viral phenomenon? And: Who was the first editor after the one at Scribner’s to decide that this description deserved to stand on its own and have “legs” independent of Williams’ full article?
It’s possible that the first editor to pick up the Norton piece and run with it was not a newspaper editor at all.
Another New York-based monthly being published during this period was The New Era. Subtitled “A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Humanity, Judaism, and Literature,” The New Era ran the Emperor Norton excerpt in its own July 1875 issue — with a credit to Williams and Scribner’s.
Here’s the cover. Note the third item in the table of contents:
And, here’s how the Emperor Norton excerpt appeared in the issue:
Page 421 of The New Era, V5 N7, July 1875 — including description of Emperor Norton excerpted and reprinted from Samuel Williams’ article, “The City of the Golden Gate,” Scribner’s Monthly, V10 N3, July 1875, p. 275. Source: Hathi Trust
It stands to reason that the July 1875 issues of Scribner’s Monthly and The New Era were published within days of one another. Which raises a number of questions…
Did the editor of The New Era, Raphael De Cordova Lewin, first encounter the Emperor Norton passage in Scribner’s published version of Samuel Williams’ article? Or had the Scribner’s editor, Josiah Gilbert Holland, sent Lewin an advance copy of either the article or the entire July 1875 issue?
And: Where did the first newspaper editor to excerpt and reprint the Emperor Norton item originally see it — in Scribner’s? or in The New Era?
A final thought…
Hard to document, but one theory worth considering: The sheer saturation of coverage of Emperor Norton in California newspapers during the 20-year period of the Emperor’s reign helped bring the Emperor to the attention of those who visited and lived in California during these years — and the more powerful engine of Emperor Norton’s reputation and fame across the country was in the stories these people told, in private conversations and personal letters, to friends and family “back home” and to momentary traveling partners on countless ships and trains to and from points east.
This might provide a better index for how nationally well-known Emperor Norton was by the time of his death on 8 January 1880, and a better explanation — better than the relatively few national press mentions of the Emperor before his death — for why, by the end of January 1880, newspapers in at least 33 of the current and future states of the Union had published more than 150 obituaries, death notices, tributes, and memories of the Emp.
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List of newspapers that reprinted the Emperor Norton excerpt from Samuel Williams’ article, “The City of the Golden Gate,” Scribner’s Monthly, July 1875. This listing reflects search results from Genealogy Bank and Newspapers.com. It’s likely that the item also appeared in other papers both inside and outside these database sets.
All dates are 1875.
CALIFORNIA
Petaluma Weekly Argus — 2 July
Merced County Sun — 17 July
San Benito Advance (Hollister) — 17 July
Anaheim Gazette — 24 July
Lompoc Record — 24 July
Tuolomne Independent (Sonora) — 31 July
INDIANA
Anderson Democrat — 27 August
KANSAS
Saline County Journal — 15 July
MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Daily Evening Traveler — 24 June
Boston Daily Journal — 29 June
MICHIGAN
Detroit Evening News — 21 June
Coldwater Republican — 26 June
Niles Democrat — 26 June
Muskegon Chronicle — 22 July
True Northerner (Paw Paw) — 23 July
MONTANA
Helena Daily Herald — 9 July
Helena Weekly Herald — 15 July
NEW YORK
Commercial Advertiser — 26 June
Albany Evening Journal — 1 July
The Methodist — 24 July
Troy Daily Times — 24 August
OHIO
Somerset Press — 25 June
Cincinnati Daily Times —28 June
Telegraph–Forum (Bucyrus) — 28 August
UTAH
Corrine Daily Mail — 24 June
WISCONSIN
Kenosha Telegraph — 22 July
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