Emperor Norton Status Report, Midwest Edition

March 20, 2024 / John Lumea

In September 1864, a San Francisco correspondent’s letter that included a brief description of Emperor Norton was published in a New York–based Unitarian weekly, then was reprinted 10 newspapers across 9 states.

Eleven years later, in July 1875, another New York publication, Scribner’s Monthly, published a lengthy article by a veteran columnist of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. This piece included a snapshot of the Emperor that was excerpted and reprinted in no fewer than 26 papers across 10 states.

We find only one other “write-up” of Emperor Norton published during his lifetime that was reprinted in more than 5 papers.

The description originally appeared in a 2-column-long San Francisco correspondent’s letter published in the Chicago Tribune of 26 February 1877.

An abridged version of the letter that includes the thumbnail sketch of the Emperor was reprinted in 7 newspapers in Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.

Appraisals of Emperor Norton penned by short-term correspondents often were less generous than those of San Francisco’s own journalists. Happily, the correspondent of 1877 was more sympathetic than the one of 1864.

1 Likes

categories / Research, Original sources
tags / newspapers, media coverage, national, reputation, fame, Oscar Lennox Misch, Chicago Tribune, Midwest, 1870, 1875, 1876, 1877

1870s Forecasts of a Market for Emperor Norton Photographs & Signatures

February 18, 2024 / John Lumea

In 1872 — two years before the first commercially retailed photographic portrait of Emperor Norton — an editor in Oakland wondered whether there might be a market for photographs of the Emperor and how much collectors might be willing to pay.

Five years later, in 1877, a San Francisco paper carried an editorial on the prices paid at a recent New York sale of autographs of U.S. presidents, European monarchs, and other notables. The writer observed that Emperor Norton's signatures were "going at a low rate" and suggested that this would remain the case with the Emperor’s ongoing sales of signed promissory notes continuing to glut the market — but that, in the future, the Emperor’s signature could become a more precious commodity.

In light of the four- and five-figure sums now commanded by photographs and signed promissory notes of Emperor Norton, it’s worth noting these two early — and, we believe, previously unreported — indicators that, even during the Emperor’s lifetime, there were those who saw that the Emperor eventually could find his way to the collector’s market.

1 Likes

categories / Research, Original sources
tags / photograph, signature, autograph, currency, promissory note, market, collector, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Oakland Daily Transcript, Heritage Auctions, Bonhams, 1872, 1874, 1875, 1877

Emperor Norton Does Art Criticism With a Borrowed Jackknife — And the Crowd Loves It

December 28, 2023 / John Lumea

By 1861 — and for the 18-plus-year remainder of his reign — Emperor Norton was a favorite and enduring subject for San Francisco cartoonists and theater troupes, who found that local audiences enjoyed the good-natured lampooning of their Emperor.

The Emperor himself was less amused — and, there are a couple of oft-cited examples of the Emperor’s expressing his royal displeasure over how he was portrayed in these contexts.

Recently, we uncovered an “episode of displeasure” that is even better documented than the familiar examples.

The occasion was the mounting of an advertisement using Emperor Norton’s image on a construction fence at Montgomery and California Streets. The Emperor borrowed a jackknife; cut out the image of himself; and sliced the image to shreds.

The crowd, as they say, “went wild.”

2 Likes

categories / Research, Places, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, cartoon, comic, caricature, photograph, theater, depiction, portrayal, Safe Deposit Building, Montgomery Street, California Street, advertisement, ad, George Frederick Keller, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Jump, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Reese, 1861, 1863, 1869, 1873, 1874, 1875

The Emperor Norton National Fame Accelerator of 1875

December 20, 2023 / John Lumea

Although national awareness of Emperor Norton did increase during the 20-year period of his reign — especially after 1870 — it remains the case the virtually all of the press mentions of the Emperor between his self-declaration in September 1859 and his death in January 1880 are from newspapers in California and Nevada.

It appears that fewer than 100 mentions of Emperor Norton during this 20-year period were published in papers outside these two states.

But, within this “national” group of papers outside California and Nevada…

Some 20–25% of the newspaper coverage of the Emperor can be attributed to reprints of an excerpt from a single article in 1875.

The article — written by a New York transplant and veteran editorial staffer of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin who had arrived in San Francisco 10 years earlier — was published by New York-based Scribner’s Monthly.

The excerpt reached readers in 10 states.

Details and documentation inside.

0 Likes

categories / Research, Original sources
tags / newspapers, media coverage, national, reputation, fame, Henry Whitney Bellows, Thomas Starr King, New York Christian Inquirer, Samuel Williams, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Scribner's Monthly, The New Era, reprint, 1864, 1875

Emperor Norton vs. the Rev. Mr. Hammond

July 12, 2023 / John Lumea

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.

0 Likes

categories / Research, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / Edward Payson Hammond, preacher, revival, conversion, children, child, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oregon, Andrew L. Stone, Peter Anderson, Pacific Appeal, Oakland Tribune, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1867, 1868, 1874, 1875

Emperor Norton Abolished the Democratic and Republican Parties — Twice

April 28, 2023 / John Lumea

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.

0 Likes

categories / Research, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / independent politics, independent candidate, No Party movement, political parties, Democratic Party, Republican Party, San Francisco Herald, Oakland Daily News, 1858, 1869, 1875, 1876

The Time Emperor Norton Lost His Platform But Kept His Dignity

April 12, 2022 / John Lumea

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.

1 Likes

categories / Research, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / Newark, Newark Land Company, Newark Land Association, Charles R. Peters, Charles Peters, Pacific Appeal, lawsuit, libel, land, real estate, immigrants, Oakland Tribune, Oakland Daily Transcript, William Drury, 1874, 1875, 1876

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

March 14, 2022 / John Lumea

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.

2 Likes

categories / Research, Original sources, Proclamations
tags / China, Chinese, immigration, courts, labor, society, Denis Kearney, 1868, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1878

An 1875 Photo Captures the Flavor of the Street Adjacent to Emperor Norton's Publisher and Printer

September 14, 2021 / John Lumea

Much of the relevant background is in the title.

The rare, fine-grained, wonderfully textured photograph, a stereoview, is by J.J. Reilly.

It's beautiful.

What's left is to get your bearings and see the view — which you can do by clicking below!

1 Likes

categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / San Francisco, photography, photograph, stereoview, Sansome Street, Commercial Street, Clay Street, Niantic Building, Pacific Appeal, Cuddy & Hughes, J.J. Reilly, 1875

Emperor Norton, Friend of Immigrants

March 13, 2019 / John Lumea

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.

0 Likes

categories / Original sources, Proclamations, Research
tags / immigration, immigrants, Pacific Appeal, Addie Ballou, San Francisco Call, Mechanics' Institute, Mechanics' Pavilion, Jonathan Robert Pamplin, 1875, 1908

"My Dear Lotta": Emperor Norton's Telegram to Lotta Crabtree

February 28, 2018 / John Lumea

Of the 14 telegraph message forms in the California Historical Society's collection of Emperor Norton artifacts, most appear to be fakes written and signed by prankish telegraph operators. But, one appears to be authentic and in the Emperor's hand. It's a message from Emperor Norton to Lotta Crabtree, commending her on the recently dedicated fountain that she has commissioned as a gift to the City of San Francisco — and bestowing upon her the imperial title "Lady of the Fountain."

0 Likes

categories / Original sources, Places, Research
tags / telegram, Lotta Crabtree, Lotta's Fountain, 1875, California Historical Society

Mark Twain Ate Here. Did Emperor Norton?

January 16, 2017 / John Lumea

At least three times — in a 1906 autobiographical reminiscence; in an 1893 short story; and in his 1872 book, Roughing It — Mark Twain mentions a low-fare eatery, the Miners' Restaurant, that was on the same street as — and only a block away from — the Emperor Norton's residence.

Twain himself is reported to have adopted this restaurant as his "headquarters" in the winter of 1866 and 1867.

Might the Emperor have frequented this place, too?

2 Likes

categories / Research, Original sources
tags / Miner's Restaurant, Commercial Street, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, menu, 1866, 1867, 1875

The Emperor's New Year, 1875

January 02, 2015 / John Lumea

Here's how Emperor Norton wished his subjects a Happy New Year one-hundred forty years ago today — on 2 January 1875.

1 Likes

categories / Proclamations, Original sources, Research
tags / New Year's, 1875

Filtering by Tag: 1875