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.
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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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