The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY

Filtering by Category: Bay Bridge,Proclamations

Emperor Norton on the Crest of the Farmers Market Wave

For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.

In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.

In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.

This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.

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From 60 Miles to the East, A Newspaper Foreshadows Emperor Norton's Role as Defender of the Chinese

In February 1868, Emperor Norton issued his first extant Proclamation in defense of the Chinese.

A year before that, in February 1867, an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco prompted a San Francisco correspondent to a paper in Stockton — 60 miles to the east of San Francisco — to suggest that Emperor Norton was better-positioned than the San Francisco Mayor to lead on the Chinese question.

Did the Emperor and the correspondent know one another from before?

Had they traded their views on the Chinese question?

Did they influence one another on this issue?

Very likely, both men were regular visitors to the same building on Post Street between 1862 and 1867. This would have created the opportunity for them to meet and befriend one another.

If so, the operative question is: What did they talk about?

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Emperor Norton Was More Interested in National Unity Than in "State's Rights"

Contemporaneous reports of two visits of Emperor Norton to Sacramento, separated by a decade — one visit in January 1864; another in December 1873 — point to the Emperor’s abiding and strengthening belief in the power of national government to produce national unity — to the point of making state governments, and states themselves, irrelevant.

On the 1864 visit, the Emperor issued a Proclamation that The Emperor Norton Trust has not seen mentioned elsewhere. We’ll call it a discovery!

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Emperor Norton vs. the Rev. Mr. Hammond

Edward Payson Hammond was a celebrity preacher — a Billy Graham of his day.

Today, Hammond is much less well-known in the annals of American religion than his crusading contemporary, Dwight Lyman Moody.

But, in the 1860s and 1870s, E.P. Hammond was a phenomenon.

In February 1875, Hammond brought his traveling revival road show to San Francisco for what turned out to be a two-month stand.

To get preaching gigs like this, Hammond claimed to produce hundreds — even thousands — of “conversions” everywhere he went.

To gin up these numbers, Hammond’s stock-in-trade was badgering tiny children into believing that they were evil sinners in danger of hellfire.

Emperor Norton was not down with this — and, he found a way to say so in a Proclamation that was published on both sides of San Francisco Bay in March 1875.

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Emperor Norton Abolished the Democratic and Republican Parties — Twice

Students of Emperor Norton are familiar with his August 1869 Proclamation to “abolish and dissolve the Democratic and Republican parties.”

The Emperor Norton Trust has uncovered a previously unreported second Proclamation, from September 1876, in which the Emperor commands “the dissolution of the Republican and Democratic parties” — although for different reasons than he gave in 1869.

This second Proclamation further reinforces Emperor Norton’s longstanding antipathy to the major parties and to the U.S. party system — a posture which led Joshua Norton to declare himself an “independent candidate” for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1858 and to deliver a brief speech at a public “No Party” forum in 1875.

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The Last Proclamation of Norton I?

On 24 January 1880, a newspaper in Maine published evidence of an edict that Emperor Norton issued two weeks before his death on January 8th — but that was published the day of his funeral on January 10th — by a surprising source.

Read on for the story of our fascinating discovery — a discovery that raises many new questions! 

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Did the Social Drinker Emperor Norton Close Out as a Teetotaler?

By reputation, Emperor Norton did not drink much. But, he did enjoy the occasional tipple — especially if he was being treated, perhaps by a well-wisher at one of the free-lunch taverns that he often frequented.

Indeed, the Emperor issued at least one Proclamation, in 1874, that called for abstaining from "ardent spirits, as a beverage, except only for medical purposes," and that banned the manufacture, import and sale of these spirits” — but that drew a careful distinction between “ardent” liquor and “malt liquors for the working man, and ‘wine for the stomach’s sake.’”

But, in January 1879, with the temperance movement growing ever more insistent on complete abstinence, with no exceptions or carve-outs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Emperor Norton signed an abstinence pledge.

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The "Eyes of the Emperor" in 1879

The Emperor Norton Trust previously has documented 16 Proclamations of Emperor Norton on various aspects of “the Chinese question” — the latest being published in April 1878, just 2½ weeks before the Emperor’s highly publicized sand-lot encounter that month with the anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney.

But, we’ve discovered three new pieces of evidence, from 1879, indicating that — for nearly 2 years after his encounter with Kearny, and right up until his death in 1880 — the Emperor continued to make good on his 1873 pledge and warning that “the eyes of the Emperor will be upon anyone who shall council [sic] any outrage or wrong on the Chinese” [emphasis in the original].

This evidence includes:

  • a second encounter between Emperor Norton and Denis Kearny, in January 1879, in which Kearney snarkily addressed the Emperor from his sand-lot platform;

  • an anti-Kearney public comment by the Emperor on the same day, at one of the freethinking, reform-minded discussion forums he regularly attended — a discovery that provides an opportunity to add a pin to the Trust’s interactive Emperor Norton Map of the World; and

  • a September 1879 editorial comment in the Sacramento Daily Bee, bearing witness to the Emperor’s ongoing reputation as what the Bee disparagingly called “Protector of China”

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The Pro-Vaccination Emperor of 1869

Documentation is elusive for those Proclamations of Emperor Norton that were published in the mid to late 1860s — the period in between (a) the few years after Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor in 1859 and (b) Emperor Norton’s adoption of the Pacific Appeal newspaper as his “imperial gazette” in late December 1870.

So, it’s gratifying to have discovered a “new” Proclamation from this period — especially one that

  • has resonance for our current public health crisis brought on by COVID–19; and that

  • adds to the body of evidence strongly suggesting that Joshua Norton thought of himself as being Emperor long before he declared it publicly in 1859.

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Joshua Norton at the Transamerica Pyramid

For some 35 years, students of the Emperor Norton story have followed William Drury’s account, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, of the events surrounding Joshua Norton’s declaration of himself as Emperor on 17 September 1859.

According to Drury: George Fitch was editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin on that day. Fitch’s office was in an upstairs room at 517 Clay Street. Joshua Norton marched his Proclamation into Fitch’s office that morning, and Fitch published it that afternoon.

But, that’s not how it went.

The Bulletin didn’t have an outpost on Clay Street until 1861. In 1859, the paper’s only offices were on Montgomery Street — on a site now occupied by the Transamerica pyramid.

And: Although George Fitch was a partner at the Bulletin in September 1859, he didn’t emerge as “the editor” — as the one with the power to decide what would and would not be published in the paper — until later.

That power resided with the person who actually was the editor on the day Joshua Norton appeared: James W. Simonton.

Read on for another course correction from The Emperor Norton Trust.

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Recovering Emperor Norton’s 1861 Proclamation Against Privateering

In June 1861, Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation against privateering — which basically was state-sanctioned piracy.

Recently, we discovered — or, more accurately, recovered — an image of the Emperor’s handwritten manuscript of the Proclamation that was published in a tiny magazine of California history in 1956. The print copy of the relevant issue of the magazine is at the San Francisco Public Library and was scanned and added to the Internet Archive in 2014.

We’ve not yet been able to determine whether the Proclamation was published. What seems clear, though: The existence of the Proclamation flew under the radar between 1861 and 1956; the publication of the manuscript in 1956 made little or no impression; and the Proclamation has continued to fly under the radar for the nearly 70 years since.

We’re delighted to be able to bring it back to the surface now.

One reason why this Proclamation is of interest: It offers a possible clue for explaining the still-undocumented claim that Emperor Norton called for a “League of Nations.”

Also included in this article: Details about the pioneer San Francisco bookseller Jefferson Martenet (1826–1906), whose preservation of the Norton manuscript in a personal scrapbook made it possible for us to find the manuscript in 2022.

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Historians of San Francisco Urge Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to Back "Emperor Norton Bridge"

At the end of May 2022, eight historians of San Francisco sent a letter to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown urging the Mayor to publicly support The Emperor Norton Trust’s proposal that the California state legislature pass a joint resolution that simply would add “Emperor Norton Bridge” as an honorary name for the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge — leaving in place all existing names and signage for the bridge and its parts, including the “Willie L. Brown, Jr., Bridge” honorific for the West Crossing of the bridge.

The historians joined the Trust’s call that state lawmakers authorize the “Emperor Norton Bridge” naming in 2022 — the 150th anniversary of Emperor Norton’s three newspaper Proclamations setting out the vision for the Bay Bridge in 1872.

Read on for a link to the letter.

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The Time Emperor Norton Lost His Platform But Kept His Dignity

What arguably is one of the most pivotal episodes in Emperor Norton's career has received scant attention.

In December 1870, the Emperor named the Black-owned Pacific Appeal newspaper his "weekly Imperial organ." From then until spring 1875, the Appeal and its editor, Peter Anderson, published some 250 of the Emperor's Proclamations.

But, in May 1875, the Appeal published a Proclamation in which Emperor Norton called out real estate developer Charles Peters for making false promises that were likely to bring harm to the unwitting immigrants who bought his lots in a swampy area at the southern tip of San Francisco that was being billed as Newark.

Peters sued Anderson for libel. Anderson retracted the Proclamation, throwing Emperor Norton under the bus in the process — and forbidding the Emperor from bringing the Appeal any more Proclamations. This is why published Proclamations from the Emperor become much more scarce from mid 1875 until his death in January 1880.

It appears that William Drury, in his 1986 biography of Emperor Norton, was the first to publish anything about this. But, apart from reproducing the offending Proclamation and an excerpt from Anderson's retraction, Drury has only a half-page's worth of sentences to spend on the affair.

In giving the matter such short shrift, Drury side-steps the most important questions: What could have prompted Peter Anderson to break with the Emperor in such a way? And, was Emperor Norton actually right about Charles Peters and his real estate scheme?

In short: Bill Drury leaves a big gap at the very point when big questions need answering.

Drawing on newspaper accounts from 1874–76, the following deep-dive seeks to close the gap and finds that Emperor Norton looks the best of all who were involved — in part, because he was utterly true to himself.

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Emperor Norton's Proclamations on the Chinese, 1868–1878

One of Emperor Norton’s most abiding concerns during his reign, 1859–1880, was the unjust treatment of the Chinese. For a period of more than a decade during the second half of his reign, the Emperor flagged his opposition to discrimination against the Chinese in the courts, the workplace and society — and to the physical violence that self-empowered demagogues and thugs on the West Coast meted out on Chinese during the 1860s and ‘70s.

Here, as a resource, are the published Proclamations of Emperor Norton on the Chinese that we’ve discovered so far — as they originally appeared in the papers of the Emperor’s time. There are thirteen Proclamations — plus a reference to a fourteenth.

Almost certainly, this is not an exhaustive list.
Many, many issues of newspapers from this period are lost. And, even for the many scanned issues that are included in the current digital databases, the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR) technology mean that even searches on obvious terms like “Norton,” “Emperor,” “Chinese” and “China” don’t produce every possible result.

We’ll continue to add to this list as new information comes to light.

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“A New State of Things?” A Pre-Imperial Proclamation from Joshua Norton in July 1859

On 5 July 1859, Joshua Norton took out a paid ad in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. The ad was a brief “Manifesto” addressed to the “Citizens of the Union.” It outlined in the broadest terms the national crisis as he saw it and suggested the imperative for action to address this crisis at the most basic level.

This was a little more than two months before Joshua issued his Proclamation — published in the same paper — declaring himself Emperor of the United States on 17 September 1859.

Together with what we already knew — that Joshua Norton continued to run business ads for nearly a year after his insolvency of August 1856; that the San Francisco directories of 1858 and possibly 1859 included listings for him...

The Manifesto is one of three additional pieces of evidence that Joshua Norton remained on the scene — and in San Francisco — in the period between his insolvency and his installation as Emperor.

One of these three traces is an historical “rescue” — reported by Allen Stanley Lane in his 1939 biography of Emperor Norton but apparently forgotten and possibly never documented before now.

The other two — including the Manifesto — are, we believe, discovered, documented and published here for the first time.

This new information should put to rest the conventional wisdom that Joshua Norton "disappeared" for X number of years only to "reemerge" fully transformed on a beatific day in September 1859.

No, there was a process and a path from fall to rise — from Point A to B.

These are three more of that path's public signposts.

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The Emperor of Brooklyn, Part 2

In 2015, we published a piece, “The Emperor of Brooklyn,” about Emperor Norton’s connection to Brooklyn, Calif., an area southeast of Lake Merritt, in Oakland, that was an independent township from 1856 until it was annexed to Oakland in late 1872.

The main documentary evidence for this connection was a couple of Proclamations that were published in the San Francisco-based Pacific Appeal. The Emperor had designated the Appeal his as his “imperial gazette” in December 1870 — and, ultimately, the paper published some 250 of his Proclamations. But, these particular Proclamations were datelined “Brooklyn.”

It turns out that these and other Proclamations were published simultaneously — sometimes originally — in a short-lived Brooklyn weekly called the Brooklyn Home Journal and Alameda County Advertiser.

Read on to learn about this newspaper; exactly where it was located; Emperor Norton’s visits to the paper’s offices; and the respect the paper paid to the Emperor in 1872.

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The Emperor Was Not Amused

Ostensibly, this is a piece about our recent discovery of a Proclamation in which Emperor Norton, in 1867, prohibited unauthorized stage depictions of himself.

But, a theater’s offending play and the Emperor’s response are the bread of the sandwich on offer here. The real meat is a brief history of the varied theatrical/“amusement” enterprises and their producers/impresarios that, over the course of a decade or so in the 1850s and ‘60s, occupied the second floor of the building where the play was staged — a building just around the corner from the Emperor’s imperial digs on Commercial Street in San Francisco.

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A(nother) Bay Bridge Naming Explainer

For those who haven’t made a habit of “geeking out” on the subject, the California state legislature’s protocols and historical precedents for authorizing honorary names for state bridges like the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge can be difficult to parse.

This has led many who support adding “Emperor Norton Bridge” as an honorary name for the Bay Bridge to wonder, and even question, whether this is legislatively possible.

It is. Here’s our latest effort to break it down.

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Bill Drury's "Emperor Norton Bridge" Petition of 1986

The late Phil Frank is known and even beloved in Norton circles for a particular series of his Farley comics with which — between September and December 2004 — Frank sought to educate the San Francisco Chronicle’s readership about Emperor Norton while also taking up the cause of naming the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge after the Emp.

The series is credited with having built much of the momentum for the introduction and passage of a San Francisco Board of Supervisors resolution in December 2004 calling for the new Eastern section of the Bay Bridge to be named the Emperor Norton Bridge.

What appears to have escaped the notice of most Nortonians, even those who consider themselves “tuned in” on bridge matters, is that (a) Frank had weighed in on the “Emperor Norton Bridge” imperative 18 years earlier, with a shorter series of Farley comics published in October 1986 — and that (b) this earlier series was prompted by an “Emperor Norton Bridge” petition drive launched and advanced in 1986 by William Drury, whose new biography on the Emperor was being published, promoted and reviewed at the same time.

This “memory rescue” of a key moment in “Emperor Norton Bridge” advocacy includes archival audio of a 2004 NPR interview with Phil Frank, in which Frank references the earlier petition, as well as the complete — and rarely seen — series of Frank’s 1986 Farley comics that were inspired by the petition.

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Early 1950s Push to Find a Home for Storied But Snubbed Emperor Norton Plaque

When the fraternity of E Clampus Vitus sought in 1939 to place a plaque honoring Emperor Norton at the Transbay Terminal, in San Francisco, the California Toll Bridge Authority — the developer and de facto owner of the Terminal — said No.

Finally, in 1955, the plaque was installed at the Cliff House. But, a lingering question has been: What did the Clampers do to find a home for the plaque in the 16 years between 1939 and 1955?

Certainly, World War II made it difficult to push the project forward. But, even allowing for that, we’ve uncovered some news accounts suggesting that there was more behind-the-scenes activity than previously thought.

It appears that the Clampers continued to make appeals to the Bridge Authority for at least 18 months in 1939 and 1940.

And, the effort that resulted in getting the plaque at the Cliff House in 1955 started at least 5 years earlier, in 1950 — with several brick walls on the path to the first proper dedication.

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