Caveat Emptor
Emperor Norton Pages from the Earliest Days of the Internet Can Be Grab Bags of Fact and Fiction
WHERE do old Emperor Norton web pages go to die?
In a few too many cases, they don’t. That’s the problem.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s no question but that those who created some of the most oft-cited Emperor Norton pages…
ZPub.com (1996) *
NotFrisco.com (1999) **
…did so with the best of intentions, and that some of the information still is good.
But, after creating these pages, the creators themselves more or less walked away.
Based on a review of the caches of these pages archived at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, all three pages / “sites” look virtually the same today as when they went live 22–25 years ago.
These pages are, in effect, time capsules of how people created websites in the late 1990s — and of the limited information about Emperor Norton that was available, or important, to the creators a generation ago.
A fourth resource, EmperorNorton.org, was created in 2004/5. But, it takes much of its information from the earlier pages. And, like those pages, this site hasn’t had a haircut in years.
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THE EXAMPLE that has caught my attention in recent weeks is the Museum of the City of San Francisco.
Founded in 1991 by the late Gladys Hansen (1925–2017) after she retired from her longtime post as the City Archivist at the San Francisco Public Library, this museum had a physical exhibit space in the Cannery building, near Aquatic Park, in the 1990s.
After losing this space in 2000, the museum in 2002 merged with the San Francisco Historical Society to create the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, an entity that — for more than a decade, until 2015 — sought to transform San Francisco’s Old Mint building into an official City museum of San Francisco history.
Throughout this period, the Museum of the City of San Francisco kept its own website, launched in the late 1990s. The Museum called this website the “Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco” until 2019, when it dropped “Virtual.”
The earliest cache of this website’s Emperor Norton page is dated February 1997. With the exception of an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Le Roi Est Mort” article covering the Emperor’s funeral — this excerpt had been dropped from the page within a year — the text, presented as a timeline, has remained unchanged for 24 years.
On Twitter, this page is one of the most frequently cited Emperor Norton sources.
And, yet, the page includes basic uncorrected errors. For example:
An item for February 1, 1860, cites this as the date that a “decree from Norton I ordered representatives of the different states to assemble at Platt’s Music Hall.”
But, this order was part of the original Proclamation of 17 September 1859. And, the venue the Emperor specified was Musical Hall, not Platt’s Music Hall.
An item for February 5, 1861, says this was when “Norton I changed the place of his National Convention to Assembly Hall, Post and Kearny, because Platt’s Music Hall had burned.”
Emperor Norton did have to change the venue to Assembly Hall. But, it was Musical Hall, not Platt’s Music Hall, that burned. Platt’s was the building that replaced Musical Hall. And, all of this happened in February 1860 — not 1861.
An introductory sentence just above the page’s timeline notes:
Many of the “decrees” attributed to Norton I were fakes; written in jest by newspaper editors at the time for amusement, or for political purposes. Those “decrees” listed here were, we believe, actually issued by Norton.
This unfortunately fosters the impression that the “decrees listed” are the only authentic Proclamations of Emperor Norton; indeed, that — as the name on the website’s banner suggests — the Museum of the City of San Francisco is a graybeard institution with staff historians who actively maintain the list.
There are more than 300 documented Proclamations that credibly can be regarded as having been authored by Emperor Norton.
But…
The Museum’s list references only about 12 Proclamations.
With one exception, the list quotes and provides a date and source for only one of them.
The list references only three Proclamations published during the Emperor’s most prolific period, January 1871–May 1875, when the Black-owned and -operated abolitionist weekly Pacific Appeal newspaper published some 250 of the Emperor’s decrees (no quotation marks!).
So, where did the Museum’s information come from?
The page cites the 1995 edition of Gladys Hansen’s San Francisco Almanac as the source of the timeline — but, this is not true. Only 3 of the 26 items in the timeline are in the book — Emperor Norton’s death in 1880; his 1934 reburial in Woodlawn cemetery, in Colma; and San Francisco’s commemoration of the centennial of the Emperor’s death in 1980.
When I asked Museum officials about this recently, they said that they believed the organization’s Emperor Norton page probably was put together — in 1997 — by the late David Fowler, a San Francisco broadcast news reporter of the 1970s and ‘80s who created the Museum’s website.
So, they shouldn’t have been saying, for the last 24 years, that the information came from Gladys Hansen’s book.
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THE TRUTH is that, to one degree or another, stories like this can be told of all the Emperor Norton resources mentioned here.
All of these pages / sites have information about Emperor Norton that is of extremely variable quality — including information that is woefully incomplete; not sourced or documented; and / or just wrong. In some cases, they use links that have been broken — or the sites they link to have been defunct — for years.
But, because these pages / sites have been around for so damned long — and because the creators have kept on paying the hosting and domain fees, even as they have neglected the pages themselves — the pages continue to rank high in search results, and people keep on sharing these pages as though they were authoritative sources of information.
Look, I get it. Certain people got excited about Emperor Norton for a few months in the late 1990s / early 2000s. They scooped up all the low-hanging fruit they could find (or remember having heard) about the Emperor and put it on this newfangled thing called a website. Then, they moved on to other pastures.
Given how often these outdated pages have been — and continue to be — shared, it’s little wonder that so many myths and urban legends about the Emperor continue to thrive.
The thing is…
If these creators are going to keep their Norton pages live and shareable, they have an obligation to keep these pages updated to reflect the best-available information about the Emperor — and not just once every 25 years! Or, if they don’t have the bandwidth to take on such a “rejuvenation” project, they should consider removing dated information that has outlived its usefulness and providing links to more current and comprehensive research.
At a minimum, those of us who care about the Emperor’s legacy have an obligation to share only the best and most up-to-date resources.
Right now, that list does not include these pages.
* Our February 2015 article on Zpub is here.
** Although the Emperor Norton resources at NotFrisco.com are incomplete or incorrect in places, the 3-part essay on this site, “The Madness of Joshua Norton,” by Joel Gazis-Sax, remains essential reading.
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