In February 1868, Emperor Norton issued his first extant Proclamation in defense of the Chinese.
A year before that, in February 1867, an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco prompted a San Francisco correspondent to a paper in Stockton — 60 miles to the east of San Francisco — to suggest that Emperor Norton was better-positioned than the San Francisco Mayor to lead on the Chinese question.
Did the Emperor and the correspondent know one another from before?
Had they traded their views on the Chinese question?
Did they influence one another on this issue?
Very likely, both men were regular visitors to the same building on Post Street between 1862 and 1867. This would have created the opportunity for them to meet and befriend one another.
If so, the operative question is: What did they talk about?
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By reputation, Emperor Norton did not drink much. But, he did enjoy the occasional tipple — especially if he was being treated, perhaps by a well-wisher at one of the free-lunch taverns that he often frequented.
Indeed, the Emperor issued at least one Proclamation, in 1874, that called for abstaining from "ardent spirits, as a beverage, except only for medical purposes," and that banned the manufacture, import and sale of these spirits” — but that drew a careful distinction between “ardent” liquor and “malt liquors for the working man, and ‘wine for the stomach’s sake.’”
But, in January 1879, with the temperance movement growing ever more insistent on complete abstinence, with no exceptions or carve-outs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Emperor Norton signed an abstinence pledge.
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Virtually all of the published Proclamations of Emperor Norton were short — a couple of sentences; two or three very short paragraphs, tops — and virtually all originally appeared in newspapers.
Virtually all — but not all.
What appears to be the longest Proclamation by the Emperor — his verdict on the Beecher-Tilton affair, issued on 30 July 1874 and clocking in at 430 words — was published in Common Sense: A Journal of Live Ideas. This short-lived publication was a clearinghouse of information — reportage, commentary, lecture texts and letters — on "liberal" and "radical" writers, practitioners and societies of free thought and spiritualism, with a focus on the Pacific Coast.
One of the main societies covered in the pages of Common Sense was the Lyceum for Self-Culture, which met weekly at Dashaway Hall, on Post Street between Kearny and Dupont. Emperor Norton was a member and regular attendee of the Lyceum.
The full story — including the Proclamation and a rarely seen 1867 photograph of Dashaway Hall by Eadweard Muybridge — is on the flip.
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