The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY

Filtering by Tag: 1878

Emperor Norton, A Metaphor in His Own Time

Surely, one sign that a person has achieved the level of “cultural saturation” that we sometimes call “fame” is when when independent sources start using that person’s name as a shorthand to characterize other people.

Here are four stories of people not Emperor Norton who — during Emperor Norton’s lifetime — were labelled in the California press as various kinds of "Emperor Norton":

  • an “Epistolary Emperor Norton” in 1867;

  • “the Emperor Norton of the News” in 1869;

  • "the Emperor Norton of the California press" in 1873; and

  • the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” in 1878.

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The Pantheonic Statuette of Norton I

It’s well known that souvenir photographs and lithographs of Emperor Norton were sold in San Francisco shops during the Emperor’s lifetime.

Norton biographer William Drury takes it considerably further to claim that, by the early 1870s, there was a whole cottage industry of “Emperor Norton statuettes, Emperor Norton dolls, Emperor Norton mugs and jugs, Emperor Norton Imperial Cigars” — and even that there were peddlers hawking Emperor Norton merch at his funeral.

I find no evidence to support much of what Drury asserts — but…

In 1877 — a couple of years before Emperor Norton died in 1880 — a German immigrant jeweler and sculptor in San Francisco created a highly accomplished statuette of the Emperor that deserves a much closer look than it has received.

Although there is no ready evidence that this nearly-two-foot-tall statuette was sold in shops, there is evidence to suggest that it was a fixture in San Francisco saloons — and even that the Emperor himself had a copy in his apartment.

Among other things, I document here the three known copies of the statuette and offer a glimpse into the life and work of the sculptor.

There even are cameo appearances from historians of Ancient Rome and the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s a fascinating story, previously untold.

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Emperor Norton as an Artist’s Model

Addie Ballou is best known now — where she is known at all — as a women’s suffrage crusader, a rather bad poet, and a (probably overconfident) lecturer on any of the subjects she was game to talk about for an hour to any group who asked, provided they had a room and a podium.

But, Ballou also had a brief career as a minimally trained portrait artist.

A certain conventional wisdom holds that, in 1877, Emperor Norton sat for a portrait painted by Ballou — and that this is the only such portrait the Emperor ever sat for during his lifetime.

As ever with Emperor Norton, though, a look under the hood reveals that things probably are not quite as we’ve been led to believe.

Read on for some newly uncovered details about old art associations.

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The "Eyes of the Emperor" in 1879

The Emperor Norton Trust previously has documented 16 Proclamations of Emperor Norton on various aspects of “the Chinese question” — the latest being published in April 1878, just 2½ weeks before the Emperor’s highly publicized sand-lot encounter that month with the anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney.

But, we’ve discovered three new pieces of evidence, from 1879, indicating that — for nearly 2 years after his encounter with Kearny, and right up until his death in 1880 — the Emperor continued to make good on his 1873 pledge and warning that “the eyes of the Emperor will be upon anyone who shall council [sic] any outrage or wrong on the Chinese” [emphasis in the original].

This evidence includes:

  • a second encounter between Emperor Norton and Denis Kearny, in January 1879, in which Kearney snarkily addressed the Emperor from his sand-lot platform;

  • an anti-Kearney public comment by the Emperor on the same day, at one of the freethinking, reform-minded discussion forums he regularly attended — a discovery that provides an opportunity to add a pin to the Trust’s interactive Emperor Norton Map of the World; and

  • a September 1879 editorial comment in the Sacramento Daily Bee, bearing witness to the Emperor’s ongoing reputation as what the Bee disparagingly called “Protector of China”

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Emperor Norton’s Residence, the Eureka Lodgings, Was Not Located (Exactly) Where You Think It Was

Over the last 25 years or so, a consensus has emerged among those attuned to San Francisco history — and particularly among Nortonophiles — that the former site of the Eureka Lodgings — where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived between 1864/1865 and his death in 1880 — is the privately owned public open space (POPOS) known as Empire Park, located at 642 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny Streets.

That's been the consensus.

But, a careful analysis of two key bodies of evidence — (1) photographs of this stretch of Commercial Street taken between 1877 and 1906, and (2) Sanborn fire insurance and official San Francisco block (property) maps from the generation or two before and after the earthquake and fires of 1906 — reveal the Empire Park designation to be mistaken.

The Eureka Lodgings was located on Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — just not on that site.

In the attached deeply researched and documented — and extensively illustrated — article, I provide:

1) Confirmation — for the first time, I believe — of the visual ID of the Eureka Lodgings building, using photographs from during and after Emperor Norton's lifetime. (Don’t miss the fabulous detail in these new hi-res scans from 1878, c.1892–94 and 1906 — worth the price of admission!)

2) A new location for the former site of the Eureka that better accords with the historical record.

It's a deep dive — so, pull up a chair!

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

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.

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A Ring to Kiss?

In three late-in-life studio portrait photographs — taken c.1878 by two different studios — Emperor Norton can be seen wearing a mysterious ring.

Were the rings shown in these photographs one and the same? Or were they different?

Was one, or both, a gift? If so: Did one, or both, of the rings feature an Emperor Norton insignia or inscription of some kind?

Was one a Masonic ring — a symbol the Emperor’s membership in Occidental Lodge No. 22 of Free and Accepted Masons?

Was the Emperor buried with one of these rings?

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Campaign Discovers Newspaper Record of Emperor Norton’s Famous Stand-Off with an Anti-Chinese Crowd

One of the most popular stories about Emperor Norton has the Emperor dispersing an anti-Chinese riot by standing before a racist mob and saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over. But, there never has been a date or documentation for this incident.

The Emperor’s Bridge Campaign has discovered what we believe to be the first document that stands to lift key elements of this story out of the realm of legend and into the realm of history. We share it here.

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Emperor Norton Makes the News at the German "Ladies Fair" of 1878

In March, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign stumbled upon an image of a handwritten note from Emperor Norton that had been sold at auction in October 2012. The manuscript was undated and was sold as such — but the note was addressed "to the Ladies' Fair of the German Benevolent Association." With this clue as a point of departure, we undertook to try to learn more about the note — including exactly when it was written.

We published our research postulating that the Emperor penned his note around the time of the Fair, which was held between 26 February and 5 March 1878.

In this follow-up, we present the image, original text and English translation of a German-language article from 2 March 1878 that appears to include a reference to the Emperor’s letter — which, it seems, was part of an “autographic album” of letters written to the “Ladies” of the Fair by a host of “scholars, artists and statesmen,” including then-President Rutherford B.Hayes.

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Emperor Norton's Note to the Ladies of the German Benevolent Society

In early 1878, it appears, Emperor Norton penned a note "[t]o the Ladies Fair of the German Benevolent Association." When the item was sold at auction in October 2012, the auction house did not attempt to date it. But our research into the first 25 years of the German Benevolent Society, as it was called — a period that roughly paralleled the reign of the Emperor — points to the week of 27 February to 5 March 1878 as the specific moment when he reached out to say when he would be "glad to greet" these Ladies. Read on to learn more.

Also on the flip: A large, hi-res image of the Emperor's note, presented here for the first time anywhere online.

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