The annual holiday party of The Emperor Norton Trust celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. (Another apocryphal tale, alas!)
The celebration traditionally takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar, in San Francisco.
This year, we gather via Zoom. The Ninth Annual Tannenbaum Toast takes place on Sunday 12 December at 3:45 p.m. Pacific — and at all related times around the world.
The traditional drink is the Boothby cocktail.
Zoom link on the flip!
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The Emperor's Norton Trust’s seventh annual celebration of the Emperor's historical birthday on February 4th — a tradition we inaugurated with a party for the Emp's 197th, in 2015 — takes place on Thursday 4 February 2021 at 6 p.m. Pacific / 9 p.m. Eastern.
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The annual holiday party of The Emperor Norton Trust celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. (Another apocryphal tale, alas!)
The celebration traditionally takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar, in San Francisco.
This year, we gather via Zoom. The Eighth Annual Tannenbaum Toast takes place on Sunday 13 December at 2 p.m. Pacific — and at all related times around the world.
The drink is the Boothby cocktail.
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For Empire Day 2020, The Emperor Norton Trust offers a free Zoom discussion of Emperor Norton's relationships with leading black intellectuals and editors of his day — as well as the Emperor's well-documented insistence on equality, civil rights and expanded legal protections for black people.
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With our founder, John Lumea, on the road to his new home in Boston, the Trust’s traditional celebration of Emperor Norton’s birthday is a virtual affair this year.
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The annual holiday party of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. (Another apocryphal tale, alas!)
The celebration takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar, in San Francisco. The drink is the Boothby cocktail.
We'll gather for the seventh time on Sunday 8 December from 4 to 6 p.m. The formal Toast is at 5 p.m.
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Join The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign and the Comstock Saloon in our celebration of Empire Day — the anniversary of Joshua Norton’s public declaration of himself as Emperor on 17 September 1859.
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An abiding concern of Emperor Norton was for the welfare of immigrants. The Emperor issued numerous Proclamations and took other actions in the defense and support of specific immigrant communities — notably, the Chinese, German and French.
More broadly, Emperor Norton wanted to ensure that the basic needs of arriving immigrants be met. This included his determination that cash-poor immigrants have enough money to get started in their new country.
His concern for the financial security of immigrants was evident at least as early as November 1867, when he issued a brief Proclamation that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner.
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In April 1875, Emperor Norton issued one of his most important Proclamations on the welcome, sympathy, assistance, protection and care of immigrants.
Thirty years later, in September 1908, this Proclamation was bumped to the top of the pile, when the Emperor’s portraitist Addie Ballou included it — unsourced — in a brief memoir of her experience of the Emperor that she wrote for the San Francisco Call.
Alas, the Proclamation has languished in unmentioned obscurity for most of the last 110 years — not least, because it has not been publicly sourced and documented as authentic.
This, we do here.
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In 1860, the prominent African-American editor and civil rights activist Philip Alexander Bell arrived in San Francisco from New York City to take up the editor’s chair at the San Francisco Mirror of the Times newspaper —the intellectual and political heartbeat of the emerging movement for African-American equality in California.
One of Bell’s earliest editorial items — published on 20 August of that year — was about Emperor Norton. Within a matter of hours, the Emperor responded in writing, and Bell published the note the following day under the headline “A Pacific Proclamation.”
Twenty months later, Bell would join Peter Anderson, a founder of the Mirror, in converting the paper to a new African-American weekly called The Pacific Appeal. At the end of 1870, Emperor Norton named the Appeal his imperial gazette; and, over the next four-and-a-half years, Anderson, as editor, published some 250 of the Emperor’s proclamations — including his many decrees recognizing the humanity and rights, and demanding fairness and equality, for marginalized and immigrant people, specifically: the Chinese, Native Americans and African-Americans,
The fact that Emperor Norton responded to Philip Bell in 1860 — and what he said — tells us much about the Emperor.
We believe this is the first modern publication of the images and full texts of Bell’s editorial and the Emperor’s reply.
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In February 2015, The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign inaugurated the modern tradition of celebrating Emperor Norton’s historical birth date with a 197th birthday party where we presented our research establishing 4 February 1818 as the Emperor’s date of birth.
We’ve been celebrating the Emperor’s birthday on February 4th ever since — including last year, when we led San Francisco in commemorating the Emperor’s 200th.
So, join the Campaign at the Comstock Saloon this coming February 4th to celebrate the Emperor’s 201st birthday…on his birthday!
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The annual holiday party of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. By tradition, the celebration takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar in San Francisco, where we'll gather for the sixth time on Sunday 9 December from 4 to 6 p.m.
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The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign is turning five! Please help us celebrate this important milestone!
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Virtually all of the published Proclamations of Emperor Norton were short — a couple of sentences; two or three very short paragraphs, tops — and virtually all originally appeared in newspapers.
Virtually all — but not all.
What appears to be the longest Proclamation by the Emperor — his verdict on the Beecher-Tilton affair, issued on 30 July 1874 and clocking in at 430 words — was published in Common Sense: A Journal of Live Ideas. This short-lived publication was a clearinghouse of information — reportage, commentary, lecture texts and letters — on "liberal" and "radical" writers, practitioners and societies of free thought and spiritualism, with a focus on the Pacific Coast.
One of the main societies covered in the pages of Common Sense was the Lyceum for Self-Culture, which met weekly at Dashaway Hall, on Post Street between Kearny and Dupont. Emperor Norton was a member and regular attendee of the Lyceum.
The full story — including the Proclamation and a rarely seen 1867 photograph of Dashaway Hall by Eadweard Muybridge — is on the flip.
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The bicentennial of Emperor Norton's birth is 4 February 2018.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign, in partnership with Bay Area institutions, is producing Emperor Norton at 200 — a series of exhibits, talks, toasts and other special events in February 2018 and throughout the bicentennial year.
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The annual holiday party of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. By tradition, the celebration takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar in San Francisco, where we'll gather for the fifth time on Sunday 10 December from 4 to 6 p.m.
To join us for a Procession to the Toast — led by Emperor Norton, as played by our friend, Joseph Amster — come to Union Square and gather at the foot of the tree at 3:30 p.m.
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In 2015, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign launched a new holiday to commemorate the date — 17 September 1859 — when Joshua Norton declared himself and his Empire. We called it Empire Day.
Little known and appreciated is that, for many years — as part of his imperial rounds — Emperor Norton hopped the ferry every week and visited Oakland.
So, this coming September 17th — the third Empire Day— we celebrate with a Sunday afternoon ferry ride and family-friendly outing to the city that anchors the eastern end of the Emperor Norton Bridge.
The Emperor rode for free. So...
Round-trip ferry tickets are free to Emissaries of the Empire a.k.a. members of the Campaign.
Is your Emissary card up-to-date?
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On the morning of 17 September 1859, Joshua Norton delivered to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin his Proclamation declaring himself Emperor of the United States. The declaration appeared in that evening's edition. Who'd have guessed that, within a month, a newspaper in Mississippi would have printed the decree in full on its front page?
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At the Campaign's next Field Talk — on Sunday 4 June — we'll visit the sites and tell the stories of the two firms that printed all of Emperor Norton's bonds and most of his Proclamations: Cuddy & Hughes and Charles A. Murdock & Co.
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Over the course of several months in 1873, Emperor Norton issued a series of Proclamations calling out the exploitation of Native American people; urging a peaceable resolution to the Modoc War that was taking place at the time; and warning that the execution of Captain Jack and other Modoc leaders — a punishment mandated by an Army court-martial and eventually carried out — would only make matters worse.
The Emperor's Bridge Campaign has discovered a May 1873 diary entry — by a 13-year-old boy living in Oakland — that further illuminates the Emperor's take on the Modoc War and on Native Americans in general.
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