On the morning of September 17, 1859, a “well-dressed and serious-looking man” walked into the places of work of The San Francisco Night Bulletin and – with out rationalization – handed over a doc that he wished to see revealed. Intrigued, the paper’s editors carried a proclamation in that night’s version on web page 3:
“On the peremptory request and want of a giant majority of the residents of those United States, I, Joshua Norton, previously of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the final 9 years and 10 months previous of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of those United States.”
The doc then requested representatives from across the nation to satisfy in San Francisco’s Musical Corridor “to make such alterations within the current legal guidelines of the Union as could ameliorate the evils underneath which the nation is laboring”. It was signed, “NORTON I, Emperor of america”.
Norton was referring to the heightened political pressure surrounding slavery. The Southern states largely relied on enslaved folks for his or her economic system, however the North opposed it. When the anti-slavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Southern states started pulling out of the union – in the end ensuing within the Civil Conflict.
The musical corridor burned down simply 9 days earlier than the assembly was as a consequence of happen, and though Norton rescheduled it at a unique venue, apparently nobody confirmed up.
As Tesla billionaire Elon Musk continues to affect the trajectory of america, it appears a superb time to recollect one other South African who additionally tried to form the nationwide dialog, albeit not as efficiently.
Musk, Trump’s appointed chief of the US authorities’s Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), has cancelled $1bn value of Variety, Fairness and Inclusion contracts, drastically decreased USAID’s funding of charitable programmes world wide, and tried to cut back the federal authorities workforce by two million folks.
He has divided opinion, with some expressing their ire by setting Tesla vehicles and showrooms alight, whereas others admire him bringing his youngsters into the Oval Workplace and brandishing a chainsaw on stage throughout Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.
Norton didn’t have this type of entry to energy, and he didn’t encourage a public backlash. However he was a cult determine, says John Lumea, founding father of the Emperor Norton Belief, a nonprofit which works to advertise Norton’s legacy via analysis and advocacy, and the main up to date scholar of Norton’s life. What’s extra, “he was method forward of his time on human rights points”.
As Jane Ganahl, co-founder of the San Francisco literary pageant Litquake, wrote in a 2018 endorsement of a proposal to rename a part of the Bay Bridge in his honour: “Emperor Norton might have been a time traveller. A Nineteenth-century man with Twenty first-century sensibilities, Joshua Norton fought for the rights of immigrants, ladies and people who suffered underneath non secular persecution.”
The Emperor – additionally self-styled as “Protector of Mexico” as he believed, rightly it seems, that Mexico was susceptible to the ambitions of Napoleon III of France – “reigned” for simply over 20 years. Carrying a sensible blue uniform with spectacular brass epaulettes, he roamed the streets of San Francisco on foot, inspecting sidewalks, extracting “taxes” from his topics, and writing imperial proclamations on a variety of topics for whichever newspaper would have them.
So far as taxes have been involved, these started as donations from associates and former enterprise associates. From 1870 onwards, when a lot of his former benefactors had both died or moved away, he started promoting promissory notes. Couched as investments in his “imperial authorities”, these have been primarily additionally donations.
Many individuals – each previous associates of Norton’s and people who noticed him as a sympathetic character – went together with it: some banks even issued financial institution notes in his title. On one degree, Norton was little greater than a neighbourhood eccentric who had no actual affect on politics. However he was an eccentric who remains to be remembered in books, movies, podcasts and social golf equipment.
“Clearly, there was some degree of psychological dislocation,” says Lumea, who estimates that Norton revealed not less than 400 proclamations on various topics starting from the rights of immigrants to his annoyance at not being issued with skates at an ice rink. “However, regardless of the bluster of a few of his proclamations, he was additionally a really variety individual.”
The Emperor was nonetheless a well-liked determine when, on January 8, 1880, he collapsed on the nook of California and Dupont Streets and died on the age of 61, bringing an finish to his 21-year reign. The San Francisco Name reported: “On the reeking pavement, within the darkness of a moonless evening, underneath the dripping rain … Norton I, by the grace of God, Emperor of america and Protector of Mexico, departed this life.”
After his dying, it turned clear that the emperor was primarily a pauper – his small room on the Eureka boarding home contained a wide range of strolling sticks and hats, just a few cash from America and past, and a sheath of faux telegrams (thought to have been despatched as pranks by native folks) purportedly from world leaders – so the members of the Pacific Membership, an unique businessmen’s affiliation, banded collectively to present him a becoming sendoff.
A reported 10,000 folks from all walks of life got here to pay their respects by viewing the Emperor “in state” within the metropolis morgue. His physique was paraded via the streets in a good-looking rosewood casket as folks of “all lessons from capitalists to the pauper, the clergyman to the pickpocket, well-dressed girls and people whose garb and bearing hinted of the social outcast”, as The San Francisco Chronicle reported, watched on.
Humble beginnings
There isn’t a start file for Norton, however Jewish circumcision information unearthed in the UK recommend he was born in Deptford, southeast London, in February 1818. When he was simply two years previous, his dad and mom emigrated to South Africa as a part of a bunch of Britons generally known as the 1820 Settlers, introduced by Britain to the Cape Colony to strengthen the frontier with the Xhosa folks. The British had seized their cattle and land, angering them and sparking 9 frontier wars between 1779 and 1879, 5 of which occurred earlier than 1820. Norton’s father was a farmer and service provider of reasonable means, however he nonetheless grew up with the political privileges loved by white South Africans underneath British rule.
By the point he left South Africa at 27 in 1845, Norton had tried his hand at just a few enterprise ventures, none of which have been significantly profitable. Not a lot is thought about his whereabouts or what he acquired as much as – he seems to have visited Liverpool, Boston and Rio de Janeiro – till he arrived in San Francisco in late 1849, on the peak of the California Gold Rush.
“Out West” his fortunes modified, and thru a mix of commodities buying and selling and actual property hypothesis, he turned one of many wealthier members of the increase city’s rising service provider class. “He belonged to all the correct golf equipment and lived within the fanciest lodge on the town,” says Lumea.
However his lifetime of privilege and luxury was short-lived. In 1852, desperate to capitalise on rice costs rising ninefold as a consequence of a famine in China, Norton put down a deposit for a $25,000 shipload of Peruvian rice. What appeared like a licence to print cash quickly turned out in any other case, when, days later, San Francisco was inundated with shipments of Peruvian rice – all of superior high quality to Norton’s. Believing that he’d been misled by a intermediary who’d exaggerated the standard of the rice, he refused to pay the stability and was duly sued for breach of contract.
“It appears to me that if he’d simply let it go he may need survived as a businessman,” says Lumea. “It was his insistence on seeing justice performed that resulted in his monetary spoil.” When the Supreme Court docket lastly dominated towards him in 1854 and ordered him to pay his collectors $20,000 the next 12 months ($730,000 in at the moment’s cash), all of his collectors got here calling – it’s thought he had pursuits in not less than a dozen properties – and plenty of of his associates deserted him. By 1856, he was compelled to declare chapter.
For some time, Norton seems to have plunged into some type of reclusive melancholy, however – with the nation heading quick in direction of civil warfare – he quickly started to concern himself with the problems of the day. Specifically, he disagreed strongly with the Confederacy and, particularly, its help of slavery. His answer to the approaching conflict was “an absolute monarchy, underneath the supervision and authority of an Unbiased Emperor and Supreme Council”, he said in a proclamation.
“Norton felt that, with so many competing state, regional and celebration pursuits in america, the constitutional republic and consultant democracy institutionalised within the US Structure was doomed to fail,” says Lumea. “He was searching for a method the nation might carry order out of chaos – to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat, because it have been – and thought that monarchy supplied probably the most environment friendly mechanism for doing that.” However, in fact, Norton knew his proclamation wouldn’t be obeyed.
In 1858, he introduced a run for Congress as an unbiased candidate (his title by no means made it onto the poll) and in July 1859, just a few months earlier than declaring himself emperor, he revealed a (very temporary) manifesto which lamented the “dissentions … between the North and South” and exhorted the residents of the Union to “inaugurate a brand new state of issues”.
A buddy of immigrants
Whereas a few of Norton’s proclamations have been frivolous – he as soon as issued one towards the superintendent of a skating rink, threatening him with arrest for “having refused us using skates” – Lumea notes that many others have been involved with primary human rights. For instance, Norton demanded that African Individuals be allowed to journey on public streetcars and research at public colleges, and he ordered that those that had wronged Indigenous American “tribes” be publicly punished in entrance of an meeting of “Indian chiefs”. He additionally argued for the separation between Church and state and supported ladies’s proper to vote.
But it surely was his championing of the rights of Chinese language immigrants that was most vehement and extended. Lumea has unearthed not less than 17 proclamations that cope with the rights of Chinese language folks. On February 24, 1868, he ordered “the proof of Chinese language to be taken the identical as every other international nation, in all our Courts of legislation and justice”. On the time, there was widespread public backlash towards Chinese language staff who have been felt to be driving wages down. Many commerce unionists, politicians and newspapers spoke out towards the so-called “yellow peril” and in 1882 the Chinese language Exclusion Act put an preliminary 10-year ban on Chinese language immigration. The legislation was strengthened within the following a long time, and the ban was solely lifted in 1943.
In October 1871, Norton expressed his outrage at a race riot in neighbouring Los Angeles during which 15 Chinese language males have been lynched by a white mob and “commanded the immediate and fast arrests of all individuals implicated within the stated improper”. After all, he had no precise management over the authorities.
A couple of months later, disgruntled by the town’s insufficient response to the riots, he proclaimed that “the authorities of Los Angeles are held chargeable for the outrages perpetrated on the Chinese language in that metropolis not too long ago if each individual implicated shouldn’t be correctly punished”.
Bridges within the sky
One factor Musk has in widespread with the Emperor is his knack for reimagining the world we reside in. As Musk has stated, “I feel it might be nice to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Simply hopefully not on the level of impression.”
Musk’s ambitions to colonise Mars may appear outlandish, however then so did Emperor Norton’s three 1872 proclamations ordering the development of a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland throughout the bay. “Emperor Norton had his finger on the heart beat of public coverage,” explains Lumea. “Constructing a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay was not his thought. However the Emperor pushed for and popularised the concept – and he’s the one most intently related to it.”
First, some context. In 1871, the Central Pacific Railroad Firm sought a $3m funding for the development of a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay at its narrowest level. The thought by no means acquired off the bottom because it was extensively felt that constructing a bridge 30 miles south of the town could be of little industrial profit.
Whereas the controversy was ongoing, nevertheless, Emperor Norton latched on to a a lot better thought. On January 6, 1872, he issued a proclamation “prohibiting” the railroad’s “scheme being carried into impact” and ordering as a substitute that “the bridge be constructed from Oakland Level to Telegraph Hill, by way of Goat Island [now called Yerba Buena Island]”.
Within the months that adopted, he fleshed out plans in two additional proclamations. He specified that the bridge must be “a suspension bridge” and he warned that it must be constructed “with out harm to the navigable waters of the Bay of San Francisco”. He even ordered “the cities of Oakland and San Francisco to make an appropriation [provide the funds] for paying the expense of a survey to find out the practicability of a tunnel underneath water”.
A couple of months later, when no response had come from the cities’ authorities, in typical Norton type, he commanded “the arrest, by the military, of each the Boards of Metropolis Fathers, in the event that they persist in neglecting our decrees”.
Whereas the Emperor didn’t reside to see his bridge constructed, he may need chuckled to himself had he witnessed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opening in 1936: not solely did the Bay Bridge comply with his route precisely, nevertheless it was additionally a suspension bridge.
In 1974, 102 years after Norton first floated the concept, his posthumous “I informed you sos” would have been even louder with the opening of the Transbay Tube – an underwater rail tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
The person and the myths
Norton turned a distinguished fixture of the San Francisco surroundings. Freemasons quietly paid his lease and shopkeepers accepted his financial institution notes. Patrons of native saloons would stand him the worth of a drink so he might “take a free go on the free-lunch desk” which was open to anybody who purchased a drink, says Lumea. At political occasions and lectures, the Emperor could be anticipated to reach to say his piece. “Even those that thought the Emperor absurd appeared to take pleasure in his presence,” says Lumea.
A part of the Emperor’s enchantment could have needed to do together with his charisma and character. However there was one thing extra to it, recommended Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829–1911), a Methodist minister who counted Norton as an occasional parishioner. Fitzgerald felt that it needed to do with Norton’s response to monetary and psychological spoil: “It was a curious idiosyncrasy that led this man, when fortune and motive have been swept away at a stroke, to fall again upon this imaginary imperialism. The character that would thus, when the true material of life was wrecked, assemble such one other by the train of a disordered creativeness, will need to have been initially of a mild and magnanimous kind.”
With a cult determine like Norton, there’ll at all times be some blurring between reality and fiction. Mark Twain, who additionally lived in San Francisco throughout the emperor’s reign, modelled the character of the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on him, and Robert Louis Stevenson additionally talked about Norton in his novel, The Wrecker.
Through the years there have been just a few TV variations of his life, a few written biographies by Allen Stanley Lane and William Drury, and not less than three organisations – the Historical and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (a historic consuming membership), the Imperial Council of San Francisco (which elects an emperor and empress annually) and the satirical faith of Discordianism – have adopted the Emperor as their patron saint.
As Joel Gazis-Sax wrote in his 1997 essay, The Insanity of Joshua Norton: “Most who keep in mind and love the Emperor post-mortemly, love a fable.”
To this finish, Lumea has spent the final 12 years attempting to separate the person from the parable, and the digitisation of many historic newspapers has helped significantly on this regard.
A few of Norton’s most well-known “proclamations” – the one during which he banned folks from referring to his adoptive dwelling as “Frisco” (a nickname for the town which can be a play on the phrase “frisk” as a phrase for “dance” and which was seen in print from 1950) for instance – are most certainly faux. Some could have been created by newspaper proprietors in search of readers or pushing their political agendas.
In 1869, The Oakland Each day Information, for instance, mocked San Francisco by publishing an clearly faux proclamation during which the Emperor known as for an unattainable bridge. The Emperor regularly issued counter-proclamations taking offence at such faux proclamations – and he took steps to oppose misinformation, akin to when he appointed The Pacific Attraction newspaper, based by African American civil rights and antislavery activist Philip Alexander Bell, as his new “imperial organ”, writing in December 1870 that “we…do hereby appoint the Pacific Attraction our stated organ, conditionally, that they don’t seem to be traitors, and stand true to our colours”.
Emperor Norton was a visionary, says Ganahl. He was additionally one of many first media-made celebrities. “A century and a half earlier than we ever heard the title Kardashian, the Emp’s antics made for glorious copy, and he was hounded by the handfuls of newspapers that known as San Francisco dwelling after the gold rush. What they didn’t immediately observe, they made up in a really actual ‘part one’ of Pretend Information.
“By the point he died on the peak of his ‘reign’, he was placing San Francisco on the map as a spot that welcomed nuts and dreamers, anybody who colored outdoors the strains. And so it stays at the moment.”
Emperor Norton was solely ever an area hero, however 150 years after his dying, he stays recognized and liked all through the Bay Space, says Lumea. “He’s seen as a harbinger of San Francisco values, figuring out with these on the margins, and preventing for the little man. The truth that he was doing that from outdoors of energy makes it all of the extra poignant.”
