Emperor Norton, A Metaphor in His Own Time
SURELY, ONE SIGN that a person has achieved the level of “cultural saturation” that we sometimes call “fame” is when when independent sources start using that person’s name as a shorthand to characterize other people.
Consider a theoretical example: One might observe that, in his Young People’s Concerts of the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Leonard Bernstein became the Julia Child of music appreciation. With her public television program, The French Chef, Julia Child became well-known for demystifying and making accessible something — French cuisine — that most U.S. food lovers at the time thought was too rarefied and complicated for the average person to attempt. The point of the metaphor would be to say that Leonard Bernstein did for classical orchestral music what Julia Child did for French cuisine.
How well — or even whether — the metaphor applies in the three “Emperor Norton” examples the follow is a separate question. But — as an index of the Emperor’s fame during his own lifetime — the examples themselves are interesting to note.
If, and when, I find other good examples, I’ll add them to this little digest:
1867
“A SORT OF EPISTOLARY EMPEROR NORTON”
By 1850, the Scottish-born D. Wemyss Jobson (1811–1876) was in New York City and living on Chambers Street. The “D.” was for David.
Jobson initially promoted himself as having been “surgeon-dentist” to Queen Victoria and other members of the British royal family. But, over the next 10 years in New York, he developed a less-than-sterling reputation as a bit of a shyster.
Jobson — who also presented himself as an attorney — was a litigious conspiracy theorist, the conspiracies generally having to do with perceived slights to himself. He frequently was in and out of trouble with the law — and in and out of jail — his fortunes rising and falling, depending on his ability to persuade judges and juries of the validity of his claims.
Jobson was an inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer and lecturer about a wide range of matters outside his background and expertise. But, he was able to secure his chosen platforms — newspapers; lecture halls — often enough to project his dubious respectability into the public consciousness.
By the time D. Wemyss Jobson arrived in San Francisco in 1867, his reputation preceded him:
Item on D. Wemyss Jobson, Carson (Carson City, Nev.) Daily Appeal, 6 June 1867, p. 2. Source: Newspapers.com
Jobson, according to his story, used to have high old scuffles with the boys of the peerage whenever he could could leave of absence from Queen Victoria and his other chums of Windsor Castle. Jobson seems to be a sort of Epistolary Emperor Norton. We have not the remotest idea that he is a humbug.
Six weeks later, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle — shortly to be renamed the San Francisco Chronicle — ventured that, “under favorable circumstances [D. Wemyss Jobson] might develop into as important and conspicuous a local character as Emperor Norton….”:
Excerpt from item, “Jobsoniana,” Daily Dramatic Chronicle, 20 July 1867, p. 3. Source: Newspapers.cpm
Alas, Jobson was back in New York by the end of 1869.
By the end of 1875, he had been committed to an asylum on today’s Roosevelt Island, where he died in 1876.
1869
“THE EMPEROR NORTON OF THE NEWS”
Newspapers in Emperor Norton’s day were extremely competitive with one another.
The competition was personal — and, editors attacked one another in print.
In 1869, the Oakland Daily Transcript and the Oakland Daily News were fierce political rivals. As the 1871 California gubernatorial campaign was ramping up, the News favored the incumbent Democrat, Henry Haight: anti-Lincoln, anti-Black, anti-Chinese. The Transcript advocated an Independent alternative.
It was against this backdrop that the Transcript ran the following editorial in August 1869 [emphases mine]. Most likely, “The Emperor Norton of the News” of the piece was the Oakland Daily News editor — probably Calvin B. McDonald (1824–1904).
“The Regular Ticket,” editorial, Oakland Daily Transcript, 28 August 1869, p. 2. Source: Genealogy Bank
The Emperor Norton of the News, like his illustrious prototype, seems to think that his edict is all that is necessary to compel people to vote any ticket that he pleases to thrust upon them. But, unlike his prototype, when the people refuse to submit to his assumed authority, he gets mad, calls our citizens very hard names — “disorganizers, snivellers, sycophants without brains, toad-eaters, scullions,” and all that sort of thing, and raises the very dickens generally. Now, the original Norton never does anything of the kind; he issues his proclamations, to be sure, but if his subjects choose to disregard and defy his authority, as they generally do, he doesn’t go about, swearing at them, and tearing the plumes out of his chapeau and the hair from his head. He is too philosophic to cut up such ridiculous capers. He knows how futile it is to keep crying out, “look to the proclamation!” He knows well enough that the people don’t care a snap about his edicts, and he isn’t simple enough to rave and tear and smash things on that account. His imitator in the News should endeavor better to follow his example.
There is another, and very wide difference, between the two Emperors. Norton is Emperor, not by usurpation, but, by general consent. The Emperor of the News is such by his own declaration without consulting the people. There’s a great difference, too, in the style and the objects of the proclamations of the two Emperors: Those of the former are written in a concise and grammatical manner, and have for their object the public good; while those of the latter are in the worse possible taste and designed to cheat the public into a support of their author’s private aims. The imagination of the latter leads him to commit many blunders. He manages, by disenfranchising certain portions of the township, and by various other tricks, to pack a Convention that, to serve some personal purpose, must thrust a ticket upon the party, and then calls the ticket “Regular,” while, in fact, there had been no regularity about it. Then, as a climax to his brazen effrontery, he anathematizes all Republicans who do not endorse the irregularity. Norton I. never makes such ridiculous blunders.
Our “prototype” Emperor comes out the better in this comparison.
Worth noting, though…
On 18 August 1869 — just 10 days before the Transcript’s editorial — the News had published its fake proclamation that had Emperor Norton calling for a bridge from Oakland to Sausalito to the Farallon Islands, bypassing San Francisco altogether.
Might this have been part of the occasion for the Transcript’s commendation of the Emperor as the more reasonable alternative to the editor of the News?
1878
“OUR HEALDSBURG EMPEROR NORTON”
On 17 January 1878, the following item appeared in the Russian River Flag newspaper of Healdsburg, Calif.:
Item on “Healdsburg Emperor Norton, ‘Happy Jack,’” Russian River Flag, 17 January 1878, p. 3. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
The “Healdsburg Briefs” section of the next day’s Santa Rosa Daily Democrat referenced this item with the phrase “‘Happy Jack,’ the local Emperor Norton.”
A review of California newspapers of the 1850s, ‘60s, and ‘70s finds a variety of characters calling themselves “Happy Jack.” Perhaps the most notorious and legendary of these is John Harrington, a sort of celebrity thief, swindler, saloon-keeper, bar-fighter, and general rogue-about-San Francisco — with holidays at San Quentin — from the 1850s through the 1880s.
But, nothing in the newspaper record about Harrington suggests that he was the sort of outdoorsman / explorer who would have had the time or inclination to walk the 300-plus-mile trek between the vicinity of Healdsburg, Calif., and Roseburg, Ore.
More-likely candidates for the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” that performed this feat are in the two items below. Alas, these are but crusty, dry crumbs on a very cold trail. But, it would be interesting to learn more about these two other Happy Jacks, to know which qualities one of them might have possessed that led newspapers in both Healdsburg and Santa Rosa to compare him to the Emperor.
1
The first is John McKeag, one of a 4-member party who in September 1877 took a 2-week camping and hunting expedition from Dixon, Calif., to Snow Mountain, which is in the southern half of the area now designated as Mendocino National Forest.
One of the party, who signs himself “Lee,” wrote up a chronicle of the trip that was published in the San Francisco Examiner. In the opening passages, Lee identifies McKeag as “Happy Jack”:
Excerpt from “To Snow Mountain and Back,” account of a camping and hunting expedition undertaken in September 1877, San Francisco Examiner, 27 September 1877, p. 1. Source: Newspapers.com
“As the crow flies,” Dixon is less than 60 miles to the east of Healdsburg. This raises the possibility that — if, indeed, John McKeag is the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” mentioned in the Healdsburg paper only 4 months later — he was not a resident of Dixon but simply had been invited by friends there to join their band.
According to the account in the Examiner, the full trip covered 230 miles. Perhaps — again, assuming that McKeag is our man — he was treating the expedition as practice run for the longer foot trip to Roseburg, Oregon.
2
Another possibility: In April 1886 — eight years after the Russian River Flag noted the return of “[o]ur Healdsburg Emperor Norton, ‘Happy Jack’” from Roseburg — the weekly Roseburg Review flagged the apparently-final departure of William Fields, “better known as Happy Jack,” from nearby Gardiner, Oregon.
Item on “Happy Jack” William Fields, Roseburg Review, 16 April 1886, p. 3. Source: Genealogy Bank
Gardiner is only about 50 miles to the northwest of Roseburg. Might William Fields be the Healdsburg Emperor Norton — the theory being that, on his hike to Roseburg at the end of 1877 and dawn of 1878, he liked the area so much that he decided to move there?
High speculation, to be sure, on both of these Happy Jacks.
But, for any scholar of the Emperor Norton, a certain amount of speculation comes with the territory!
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