The Daily Alta's Emperor Norton Well
The Paper’s Interest and Influence in Using Emperor Norton as a Comic Prop Was Well–Known at the Time
IN LATE DECEMBER 1870, Emperor Norton issued the following Proclamation naming The Pacific Appeal, a prominent Black-owned and -operated weekly newspaper, as his “imperial organ.” The Proclamation was published in the Appeal on 7 January 1871.
Proclamation of Emperor Norton naming The Pacific Appeal his “imperial organ,” issued 23 December 1870, The Pacific Appeal, 7 January 1871, p. 1. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
In selecting the Appeal, the Emperor stipulated that the paper would retain his favor so long as “they are not traitors, and stand true to our colors.”
The Emperor’s point: He was tired of being misrepresented in the press.
William Drury might have been the first — in his 1986 biography Norton I: Emperor of the United States — to flag the Daily Alta California newspaper as having been the worst of the offending papers, thanks to the particular fixation of the paper’s editor on the Emp.
Albert S. Evans, editor of the Daily Alta California, in c.1865. Carte de visite photograph by the studio of Hamilton, Tidball & Morse. Collection of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Source: Calisphere
Albert S. Evans (1831–1872) had arrived in San Francisco by 1862 and worked as an editor and reporter at a number of newspapers — including the Daily Evening Bulletin and the Morning Call — before landing at the Daily Alta in 1863.
For the next 9 years, Evans was the Alta’s city editor, a role in which he gleefully wrote and published many fake stories and fake proclamations of Emperor Norton.
It seems that this must have come naturally to Evans — to wit…
In September 1872, Albert Evans sailed for New York to help oversee publication of his book À la California: Sketches of life in the Golden state (1873), which was on press at the time.
On his return voyage, Evans was aboard the steamship Missouri, which caught fire and burned in the Bahamas in October 1872.
Evans died in the disaster. But, in early November 1872, when there still was faint hope that Evans might have escaped and survived, the Alta ran a kind of pre-obituary, in which the paper noted that Evans:
had a keen perception of the ludicrous, and he had a large fund of humorous suggestions, upon which he could draw for the entertainment of his readers or hearers.
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PLENTY OF OTHER local editors and reporters besides Albert Evans plied the journalistic trade of burlesquing Emperor Norton during the Emperor’s lifetime.
But, I recently stumbled upon a couple of pieces of evidence — not mentioned in Drury’s account — that other newspapers at the time recognized the Daily Alta and Evans as tops in the field!
Here’s one that appeared in The Placer Herald of Auburn, Calif., on 23 April 1870. Tweaking the Alta, the paper’s San Francisco correspondent wrote:
Excerpt from weekly San Francisco Letter by correspondent “Yerba Buena,” dated April 21, The Placer Herald, 23 April 1870, p. 2. Source: Genealogy Bank
It is a fact not generally known that in the Alta building is a secret room, a mysterious chamber as carefully guarded as the Anatomical Museum in Bluebeard’s Mansion. Ranged around the wall are hundreds of Post office boxes, each one labled [sic] and containing a stereotype ready for use. One whole row is taken up with wicked attempts to make New Englanders dissatisfied with their climate, another contains descriptions of mammoth turnips, giant beets, monstrous apples and extraordinary peaches, all neatly ticketed in the order they are to be used. Above are the Pioneer obituaries, with blank left for name and date of death. These were written by contract many years ago, put in type, and are worked up indiscriminately, the only regard being to sex. Then come the paragraphs beginning “Another old landmark gone,” followed by annual prophecies of wet and dry seasons, and one huge pigeonhole filled with a ten column biography of Emperor Norton to which daily additions are made.
Two years earlier, Albert Evans’s farcical invocations of Emperor Norton had become so routine as to rise — or, depending on one’s view, sink — to the level of schtick.
This led the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (soon to be renamed the San Francisco Chronicle) — referring to Evans by his Daily Alta pen name “Fitz Smythe” — to quip that “Fitz Smythe and Emperor Norton have gone into the show business.”
Humorous item on Daily Alta editor Albert Evans, pen name “Fitz Smythe,” and Emperor Norton, Daily Dramatic Chronicle, 8 June 1868, p. 2. Source: Newspapers.com
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BUT, ALBERT EVANS was not without his sympathies for the Emperor. Even when he is waxing absurd, as in this front-page item from November 1864…
“Imperial Cap,” item on an addition to Emperor Norton’s wardrobe, Daily Alta California, 2 November 1864, p. 1. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
…one detects an underlying fondness.
Indeed — worth noting: One of the most beloved and oft-quoted tributes to Emperor Norton — published in the Daily Alta on 22 January 1867 as a commentary on the previous day’s false and unjust arrest of the Emperor — almost certainly was penned by Fitz Smythe:
Norton was in his day a respectable merchant, and since he has worn the Imperial purple he has shed no blood, robbed nobody, and despoiled the country of no one, which is more than can be said of any of his fellows in that line.
The great irony is that — for all the lampooning mockery that Emperor Norton had to endure from Albert Evans — when the Emperor died in January 1880, more than 7 years after Evans’s death, only one San Francisco newspaper reported the news on the next day’s front page: the Daily Alta California.
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