Mr. Cowan's Opportunity
More Evidence That, in 1934, the Influence of One Particular Early-20th-Century Chronicler of Emperor Norton’s Life Probably Was Central to the Choice of an Incorrect Birth Date for the Emperor’s Headstone
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, in one of my earliest forays into the field of “Emperor Norton birth date studies,” I wrote a piece that focused on an excerpt from a brief biographical essay on the Emperor by Robert Ernest Cowan (1862–1942).
Robert Ernest Cowan in 1930. Source: "California Bibiographers: Father and Son," Robert G. Cowan interviewed by Joel Gardner (Regents of the University of California, 1979).
Cowan was a noted “bookman” who got a 25-year start as a bookseller in San Francisco before being hired in 1919 by Los Angeles-based copper mining heir and book collector William Andrews Clark, Jr., to become Clark’s librarian and “acquisitions advisor” — a position Cowan held until Clark’s death in 1934, moving to Los Angeles himself in 1926. Clark bequeathed his collection to U.C.L.A.
Cowan published his Norton essay in the October 1923 number of the new California Historical Society Quarterly — where he was serving at the time as inaugural editor.
Here, Cowan states flatly and without explanation that the Emperor was "born February 4, 1819."
In my December 2014 piece, I show that — in the same essay — Cowan falsifies the Emperor’s birth date by redacting and rewriting a Daily Alta editorial item from 4 February 1865 to turn the item into a fake proclamation and make it serve as a prop for his 1819 birth date — rather than the 1818 date that the original Alta item actually supports.
Why wasn’t Cowan’s shameless wool-pulling seen as such at the time — or, indeed, when decisions were being made a decade later about which date to put on Emperor Norton’s headstone?
Most likely, it’s down to groupthink and club mentality.
In January 1934, members of the San Francisco-based Pacific-Union Club organized themselves as the Emperor Norton Memorial Association for the purpose of funding and securing a new plot and headstone for the Emperor, after the Emperor — along with so many others — was evicted from his original resting place in San Francisco’s Masonic Cemetery.
As I detailed in May 2015, the Association had deep connections to the board and committee structures of the California Historical Society.
Cowan’s own longstanding membership in the CHS leadership circle and his use of CHS to broadcast his Emperor Norton “scholarship” would have made it unlikely for the CHS-connected Association to look elsewhere for intelligence on which birth date to inscribe on the Emperor’s headstone.
The Association would just gave taken Cowan’s word for it that 1819 was the date.
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ON THE “CONTENT” SIDE, I’ve looked to Robert Ernest Cowan’s 1923 essay to explain my educated guess for how the Emperor Norton Memorial Association in 1934 came to decide that 1819 was the birth date that should be memorialized in the rose granite of the Emperor’s new headstone.
Comes new evidence that Cowan revived and even ramped up his decade-old birth date fakery in 1934, and that he did so while he was president of the board of the California Historical Society — a board that included 2 of the 4 officers of the new Emperor Norton Memorial Association — one of whom was the Association’s president.
Let’s take a walk in the weeds…
In 1964, the fine-press printer Ward Ritchie (1905–1996) published The Forgotten Characters of San Francisco as a collection of three reprinted pieces.
Ritchie originally had printed and published the title essay by Cowan in 1938 as a standalone piece. In the forward to the 1964 edition, Ritchie wrote:
“Sir Robert,” as he was affectionately called by his friends in the book circles of Los Angeles, told the story of Emperor Norton and the many other picturesque eccentrics who were in San Francisco in the 1860's and 1870’s to the members of The Zamorano Club of Los Angeles....
The Zamorano Club talk which Cowan gave on April 28, 1938, was much too interesting to be heard that once and forgotten, so after the meeting I suggested to “Sir Robert" that he let me print it as a keepsake for the Club members. Cowan never wrote his speeches, he never had notes, but they were precisely organized in his mind. He had an uncanny ability of selecting the exact word or expression that would give an unusual lucidity to his thoughts. His memory was such that he had no difficulty in giving me a copy almost verbatim of the talks as he had delivered it. We printed an edition of 500 copies of which 100 were bound in green wrappers and “reserved for the author and the members of the Zamorano Club” and the balance bound in boards with a cloth back for general sale. This limited number was soon exhausted and the book became one of those rare items the antiquarian book dealer so loves.
In at least one respect, Cowan’s “memory” had nothing to do with it. The “Forgotten Characters” text that Ritchie originally published in 1938 and reissued in 1964 includes an Emperor Norton section that is just a verbatim copy-and-paste of Cowan’s earlier Norton essay from 1923.
The first two full paragraphs of the 1923 essay are repurposed as the opening of “Forgotten Characters.” As regards Emperor Norton, the only other minor changes Cowan makes between 1923 and 1938 are
the insertion of two new paragraphs:
one para about the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge: an edit that actually does more harm than good by attributing to Emperor Norton a fake Proclamation — a joke at the Emperor’s and San Francisco’s expense, published in the Oakland Daily News on 18 August 1869 — that has the Emperor calling for a bridge “spanning” an absurdly malingering route from Oakland to Goat Island (now Yerba Buena Island) to Sausalito to the Farralon Islands, an uninhabited outcropping of rocks 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco. The original bridge to nowhere.
one para about the Emperor’s new gravesite and headstone at Woodlawn Memorial
the change of Joshua Norton’s birthplace from “probably in Scotland” (1923) to “either in Edinburgh or London” (1938)
Ward Ritchie. Source: UC Irvine
In California, 1928 saw the establishment of two groups to promote (a) the printing and book arts and (b) the collecting of rare books and manuscripts: the Zamorano Club in Los Angeles and the Roxburghe Club in San Francisco. Both clubs generally were exclusive to members who had the money to support these interests.
It’s not surprising that Ritchie — a Los Angeles native who was admitted to the Zamorano in 1934 — would want to connect his own books and Cowan’s participation in them to a society that promoted both him and Cowan.
Inscription and signature of Robert Ernest Cowan in presentation copy of Forgotten Characters of Old San Francisco dated 5 April 1938. Source: Biblio
But, given that there currently is on the collector’s market a presentation copy of Ward Ritchie’s 1938 edition of Forgotten Characters signed and dated by Cowan on 5 April 1938 — and given that this edition was being reviewed by late March of that year — it appears that some combination of the following is the case:
Cowan’s Zamorano talk did not take place on 28 April 1938, as Ritchie wrote in his forward to the 1964 edition, but on some other date.
Cowan’s Zamorano talk did take place on 28 April 1938 — but, in 1964, Ritchie was confused about the date of the talk relative to his publication of it.
In 1938, Ritchie published a different version of Cowan’s talk — not one Cowan gave at the Zamorano.
Cowan never gave his talk at the Zamorano.
Here’s the introductory excerpt of a review of Forgotten Characters that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 7 April 1938 (click image for the full review):
Introductory excerpt of Joseph Henry Jackson’s review of Robert Ernest Cowan’s Forgotten Characters of San Francisco (Ward Ritchie Press, 1938), San Francisco Chronicle, 7 April 1938, p. 11. Source: Genealogy Bank
And here’s a shorter item on the book that ran in the Los Angeles Times on 27 March 1938:
Notice for Robert Ernest Cowan’s Forgotten Characters of San Francisco (Ward Ritchie Press, 1938), Los Angeles Times, 27 March 1938, sec. 3, p. 6. Source: Genealogy Bank
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WARD RITCHIE writes in his 1964 forward that Cowan’s “Forgotten Characters” presentation at the Zamorano Club “was much too interesting to be heard that once and forgotten” — the clear implication being that Cowan’s talk was a one-time thing.
Ritchie’s reference in the same paragraph to “talks” — plural — may have been a slip that reveals the truth of the situation.
Here’s an item about a version of the “Forgotten Characters” talk that Cowan gave to the Historical Society of Southern California on 4 February 1936:
Item on Robert Ernest Cowan's talk, "The Forgotten Characters of San Francisco," at 4 February 1936 meeting of the Historical Society of Southern California, The Quarterly (HSSC), V18 N1, March 1936, p.32. Source: Internet Archive
The March 1934 number of the California Historical Society Quarterly carried a similar notice for what clearly is an earlier version of the “Forgotten Characters” talk that Cowan presented at a California Historical Society board luncheon on 26 January 1934:
Note on Robert Ernest Cowan’s 26 January 1934 talk on Emperor Norton and other of “the curious street characters of San Francisco in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies” at the annual meeting of the California Historical Society, California Historical Society Quarterly, V13 N1, March 1934, p. 88. Source: JSTOR
Note that Cowan is identified here as the Society’s “President.” During this period, the California Historical Society elected its board for the following year at its January annual meeting. Cowan had been elected and subsequently appointed as President at the January 1933 meeting. His 26 January 1934 talk was a kind of “capstone” address that coincided with the annual meeting the same day — when the board and officers for 1934 would be elected and appointed.
The most reliable and complete lists of CHS board and committee rosters for this period were published in the front sections of issues of the California Historical Society Quarterly — which, alas, are heavily paywalled right now.
But, a little persistence uncovers the following board roster that appeared in the Quarterly’s September 1933 number (vol. 12, no. 3) — showing Cowan as President…
California Historical Society board of directors roster, California Historical Society Quarterly, V12 N3, September 1933. Source: JSTOR
…and the following roster from the March 1934 issue (vol. 13, no. 1), showing Cowan still on the board but no longer serving as President:
California Historical Society board of directors roster, California Historical Society Quarterly, V13 N1, March 1934. Source: JSTOR
The September 1942 number of the Quarterly carried an obituary for Cowan which noted: “He had served as our vice-president from 1923 to 1932 and was a member of our Board of Directors and committee on publication from 1922 until his death. In February 1933 he became president and served for one year. “
Introductory excerpt of obituary for Robert Ernest Cowan, California Historical Society Quarterly, V21 N3, September 1942, p. 282. Source: JSTOR
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IT’S A REASONABLE bet that Robert Ernest Cowan signed off on the “Forgotten Characters” text that Ward Ritchie published in 1938.
The 1938 text included Cowan’s falsified claim from 1923 — that Joshua Norton was “born February 4, 1819.”
The fact that Cowan’s 1819 birth date claim survived into 1938 surely means that it also was included in earlier versions of Cowan’s “Forgotten Characters” talk — including the one Cowan delivered at the California Historical Society board luncheon on 26 January 1934.
Almost certainly present at that late January 1934 luncheon were two of Cowan’s fellow CHS directors who are in both of the CHS board rosters published in September 1933 and March 1934 (see above): Ernest A. Wiltsee (first vice president) and Alexander T. Leonard, Jr.
A pertinent synchronicity…
On 8 January 1934 — barely more than two weeks before Cowan’s talk — the Emperor Norton Memorial Association was established with Wiltsee as President and Leonard as Secretary.
Within a few months, the Association placed an order with L. Bocci & Sons, in Colma, Calif., for the headstone that was to be dedicated during a public ceremony held on 30 June 1934 at the Emperor’s new gravesite in Woodlawn Memorial Park, in Colma.
The order specified 1819 as the birth date to be inscribed on the stone.
Possibly, neither Wiltsee, Leonard, nor their fellow Association officers George H. Barron (the former longtime curator of the de Young Museum) or Fred Moody, could say with any confidence — i.e., based on their own independent research — when Joshua Norton was born.
No matter. Robert Ernest Cowan — the bibliographer who faked a bibliography for Joshua Norton’s birth in 1923; was still doing so in 1934; and kept doing it for years after that — had more than enough confidence for all of them. And these well-intentioned graybeards were not going to have the temerity to fact-check the great Robert Ernest Cowan — much less, contradict him in the most public way by engraving a different birth date on the Emperor’s headstone than the one Cowan — the closest thing they knew to an Emperor Norton scholar — had been publicly specifying to their own elite circles for more than a decade.
The truth is: In 1934, people generally were much more credulous of the “authority” of self-taught folk “historians” like Robert Ernest Cowan. It would have taken an exceptionally inquisitive, imaginative, persistent, and courageous soul to:
1
Note Cowan’s blind “quote” of a newspaper item to substantiate his claim of an 1819 birth date for Joshua Norton.
2
Track down the original newspaper item.
3
Document the discrepancies between the original and Cowan’s doctored version.
4
Bring it to the attention of the Emperor Norton Memorial Association and, if necessary, to a wider circle that, on the question of Norton’s birth date, this particular emperor — Cowan — had no clothes.
Who knows? Perhaps in 1934 there was someone who saw Cowan’s undue influence but who — unable to muster the courage to say anything — could do nothing but shake their head at the “1819” inscription on Emperor Norton’s headstone and hope that, one day, the truth would out.
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