On the morning of September 17, 1859, a “well-dressed and serious-looking man” walked into the offices of The San Francisco Evening Bulletin and – without explanation – handed over a document that he wished to see published. Intrigued, the paper’s editors carried a proclamation in that evening’s edition on page 3:
“At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States.”
The document then asked representatives from around the country to meet in San Francisco’s Musical Hall “to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring”. It was signed, “NORTON I, Emperor of the United States”.
The proclamation of ‘Emperor Norton’ as seen in The San Francisco Evening Bulletin on September 17, 1859 [Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library]
Norton was referring to the heightened political tension surrounding slavery. The Southern states largely depended on enslaved people for their economy, but the North opposed it. When the anti-slavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Southern states began pulling out of the union – ultimately resulting in the Civil War.
The musical hall burned down just nine days before the meeting was due to take place, and although Norton rescheduled it at a different venue, apparently no one showed up.
As Tesla billionaire Elon Musk continues to influence the trajectory of the United States, it seems a good time to remember another South African who also tried to shape the national conversation, albeit not as successfully.
Musk, Trump’s appointed leader of the US government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has cancelled $1bn worth of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion contracts, drastically reduced USAID’s funding of charitable programmes around the world, and tried to reduce the federal government workforce by two million people.
He has divided opinion, with some expressing their ire by setting Tesla cars and showrooms alight, while others appreciate him bringing his children into the Oval Office and brandishing a chainsaw on stage during Trump’s presidential campaign.
Norton didn’t have this kind of access to power, and he didn’t inspire a public backlash. But he was a cult figure, says John Lumea, founder of the Emperor Norton Trust, a nonprofit which works to promote Norton’s legacy through research and advocacy, and the leading contemporary scholar of Norton’s life. What’s more, “he was way ahead of his time on human rights issues”.
As Jane Ganahl, co-founder of the San Francisco literary festival Litquake, wrote in a 2018 endorsement of a proposal to rename part of the Bay Bridge in his honour: “Emperor Norton could have been a time traveller. A 19th-century man with 21st-century sensibilities, Joshua Norton fought for the rights of immigrants, women and those who suffered under religious persecution.”
A photograph of Emperor Norton taken in 1869 in San Francisco [Courtesy of the Collection of the Bancroft Library]
The Emperor – also self-styled as “Protector of Mexico” as he believed, rightly it turns out, that Mexico was vulnerable to the ambitions of Napoleon III of France – “reigned” for just over 20 years. Wearing a smart blue uniform with impressive brass epaulettes, he roamed the streets of San Francisco on foot, inspecting sidewalks, extracting “taxes” from his subjects, and writing imperial proclamations on a wide range of subjects for whichever newspaper would have them.
As far as taxes were concerned, these began as donations from friends and former business associates. From 1870 onwards, when many of his former benefactors had either died or moved away, he began selling promissory notes. Couched as investments in his “imperial government”, these were essentially also donations.
Many people – both old friends of Norton’s and those who saw him as a sympathetic character – went along with it: some banks even issued bank notes in his name. On one level, Norton was little more than a neighbourhood eccentric who had no real influence on politics. But he was an eccentric who is still remembered in books, films, podcasts and social clubs.
A banknote issued in the name of Emperor Norton in July 1875 [Cuddy and Hughes]
“Clearly, there was some level of psychological dislocation,” says Lumea, who estimates that Norton published at least 400 proclamations on diverse subjects ranging from the rights of immigrants to his annoyance at not being issued with skates at an ice rink. “But, despite the bluster of some of his proclamations, he was also a very kind person.”
The Emperor was still a popular figure when, on January 8, 1880, he collapsed on the corner of California and Dupont Streets and died at the age of 61, bringing an end to his 21-year reign. The San Francisco Call reported: “On the reeking pavement, in the darkness of a moonless night, under the dripping rain … Norton I, by the grace of God, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life.”
After his death, it became clear that the emperor was essentially a pauper – his small room at the Eureka boarding house contained a variety of walking sticks and hats, a few coins from America and beyond, and a sheath of fake telegrams (thought to have been sent as pranks by local people) purportedly from world leaders – so the members of the Pacific Club, an exclusive businessmen’s association, banded together to give him a fitting sendoff.
A reported 10,000 people from all walks of life came to pay their respects by viewing the Emperor “in state” in the city morgue. His body was paraded through the streets in a handsome rosewood casket as people of “all classes from capitalists to the pauper, the clergyman to the pickpocket, well-dressed ladies and those whose garb and bearing hinted of the social outcast”, as The San Francisco Chronicle reported, watched on.
A photograph of Emperor Norton dated circa 1875 [Bradley & Rulofson/Courtesy of the Collection of the Oakland Museum of California]
Humble beginnings
There is no birth record for Norton, but Jewish circumcision records unearthed in the United Kingdom suggest he was born in Deptford, southeast London, in February 1818. When he was just two years old, his parents emigrated to South Africa as part of a group of Britons known as the 1820 Settlers, brought by Britain to the Cape Colony to strengthen the frontier with the Xhosa people. The British had seized their cattle and land, angering them and sparking nine frontier wars between 1779 and 1879, five of which occurred before 1820. Norton’s father was a farmer and merchant of moderate means, but he still grew up with the political privileges enjoyed by white South Africans under British rule.
By the time he left South Africa at 27 in 1845, Norton had tried his hand at a few business ventures, none of which were particularly successful. Not much is known about his whereabouts or what he got up to – he appears to have visited Liverpool, Boston and Rio de Janeiro – until he arrived in San Francisco in late 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush.
“Out West” his fortunes changed, and through a combination of commodities trading and real estate speculation, he became one of the wealthier members of the boom town’s emerging merchant class. “He belonged to all the right clubs and lived in the fanciest hotel in town,” says Lumea.
Emperor Norton in 1859 or 1860 [Courtesy of the Bancroft Library]
But his life of privilege and comfort was short-lived. In 1852, eager to capitalise on rice prices rising ninefold due to a famine in China, Norton put down a deposit for a $25,000 shipload of Peruvian rice. What seemed like a licence to print money soon turned out otherwise, when, days later, San Francisco was inundated with shipments of Peruvian rice – all of superior quality to Norton’s. Believing that he’d been misled by a middleman who’d exaggerated the quality of the rice, he refused to pay the balance and was duly sued for breach of contract.
“It seems to me that if he’d just let it go he might have survived as a businessman,” says Lumea. “It was his insistence on seeing justice done that resulted in his financial ruin.” When the Supreme Court finally ruled against him in 1854 and ordered him to pay his creditors $20,000 the following year ($730,000 in today’s money), all of his creditors came calling – it is thought he had interests in at least a dozen properties – and many of his friends abandoned him. By 1856, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.
For a while, Norton appears to have plunged into some sort of reclusive depression, but – with the country heading fast towards civil war – he soon began to concern himself with the issues of the day. In particular, he disagreed strongly with the Confederacy and, especially, its support of slavery. His solution to the coming clash was “an absolute monarchy, under the supervision and authority of an Independent Emperor and Supreme Council”, he stated in a proclamation.
“Norton felt that, with so many competing state, regional and party interests in the United States, the constitutional republic and representative democracy institutionalised in the US Constitution was doomed to fail,” says Lumea. “He was looking for a way the country could bring order out of chaos – to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat, as it were – and thought that monarchy offered the most efficient mechanism for doing that.” But, of course, Norton knew his proclamation would not be obeyed.
In 1858, he announced a run for Congress as an independent candidate (his name never made it onto the ballot) and in July 1859, a few months before declaring himself emperor, he published a (very brief) manifesto which lamented the “dissentions … between the North and South” and exhorted the citizens of the Union to “inaugurate a new state of things”.
An Emperor Norton banknote, November 1879 [Charles A Murdock/Courtesy of the Collection of the California Historical Society]
A friend of immigrants
While some of Norton’s proclamations were frivolous – he once issued one against the superintendent of a skating rink, threatening him with arrest for “having refused us the use of skates” – Lumea notes that many others were concerned with basic human rights. For example, Norton demanded that African Americans be allowed to ride on public streetcars and study at public schools, and he ordered that those who had wronged Indigenous American “tribes” be publicly punished in front of an assembly of “Indian chiefs”. He also argued for the separation between Church and state and supported women’s right to vote.
But it was his championing of the rights of Chinese immigrants that was most vehement and prolonged. Lumea has unearthed at least 17 proclamations that deal with the rights of Chinese people. On February 24, 1868, he ordered “the evidence of Chinese to be taken the same as any other foreign nation, in all our Courts of law and justice”. At the time, there was widespread public backlash against Chinese workers who were felt to be driving wages down. Many trade unionists, politicians and newspapers spoke out against the so-called “yellow peril” and in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act put an initial 10-year ban on Chinese immigration. The law was strengthened in the following decades, and the ban was only lifted in 1943.
One of Emperor Norton’s proclamations on the rights of Chinese people, published in The San Francisco Daily Examiner on February 24, 1868 [Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library]
In October 1871, Norton expressed his outrage at a race riot in neighbouring Los Angeles in which 15 Chinese men were lynched by a white mob and “commanded the prompt and immediate arrests of all persons implicated in the said wrong”. Of course, he had no actual control over the authorities.
A few months later, disgruntled by the city’s inadequate response to the riots, he proclaimed that “the authorities of Los Angeles are held responsible for the outrages perpetrated on the Chinese in that city recently if every person implicated is not properly punished”.
Emperor Norton on a street in Chinatown, San Francisco [Courtesy of Wolfgang Sell of the National Stereoscopic Association]
Bridges in the sky
One thing Musk has in common with the Emperor is his knack for reimagining the world we live in. As Musk has said, “I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”
Musk’s ambitions to colonise Mars might seem outlandish, but then so did Emperor Norton’s three 1872 proclamations ordering the construction of a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland across the bay. “Emperor Norton had his finger on the pulse of public policy,” explains Lumea. “Building a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay was not his idea. But the Emperor pushed for and popularised the idea – and he is the one most closely associated with it.”
First, some context. In 1871, the Central Pacific Railroad Company sought a $3m investment for the construction of a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay at its narrowest point. The idea never got off the ground as it was widely felt that building a bridge 30 miles south of the city would be of little commercial benefit.
While the debate was ongoing, however, Emperor Norton latched on to a much better idea. On January 6, 1872, he issued a proclamation “prohibiting” the railroad’s “scheme being carried into effect” and ordering instead that “the bridge be built from Oakland Point to Telegraph Hill, via Goat Island [now called Yerba Buena Island]”.
A sketch of the proposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as seen in Overland Monthly in April 1913
In the months that followed, he fleshed out plans in two further proclamations. He specified that the bridge should be “a suspension bridge” and he warned that it should be built “without injury 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 determine the practicability of a tunnel under water”.
A few months later, when no response had come from the cities’ authorities, in typical Norton style, he commanded “the arrest, by the army, of both the Boards of City Fathers, if they persist in neglecting our decrees”.
While the Emperor didn’t live to see his bridge built, he might have chuckled to himself had he witnessed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opening in 1936: not only did the Bay Bridge follow his route exactly, but it was also a suspension bridge.
In 1974, 102 years after Norton first floated the idea, his posthumous “I told you sos” would have been even louder with the opening of the Transbay Tube – an underwater rail tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
A perspective view of San Francisco Bay between San Francisco and Oakland showing five of the proposed bridges, in 1926 [Courtesy of Erica Fischer]
A close-up photograph taken of Yerba Buena Island to document the progress of the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1935 [US Navy photograph]
The man and the myths
Norton became a prominent fixture of the San Francisco scenery. Freemasons quietly paid his rent and shopkeepers accepted his bank notes. Patrons of local saloons would stand him the price of a drink so he could “take a free pass at the free-lunch table” which was open to anyone who bought a drink, says Lumea. At political events and lectures, the Emperor would be expected to arrive to say his piece. “Even those who thought the Emperor absurd seemed to enjoy his presence,” says Lumea.
Part of the Emperor’s appeal may have had to do with his charisma and personality. But there was something more to it, suggested Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829–1911), a Methodist minister who counted Norton as an occasional parishioner. Fitzgerald felt that it had to do with Norton’s response to financial and mental ruin: “It was a curious idiosyncrasy that led this man, when fortune and reason were swept away at a stroke, to fall back upon this imaginary imperialism. The nature that could thus, when the real fabric of life was wrecked, construct such another by the exercise of a disordered imagination, must have been originally of a gentle and magnanimous type.”
Emperor Norton in 1871 or 1872 [Courtesy of the Collection of the California Historical Society]
With a cult figure like Norton, there will always be some blurring between fact and fiction. Mark Twain, who also lived in San Francisco during the emperor’s reign, modelled the character of the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on him, and Robert Louis Stevenson also mentioned Norton in his novel, The Wrecker.
Over the years there have been a few TV adaptations of his life, a couple of written biographies by Allen Stanley Lane and William Drury, and at least three organisations – the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (a historical drinking club), the Imperial Council of San Francisco (which elects an emperor and empress each year) and the satirical religion of Discordianism – have adopted the Emperor as their patron saint.
As Joel Gazis-Sax wrote in his 1997 essay, The Madness of Joshua Norton: “Most who remember and love the Emperor post-mortemly, love a myth.”
To this end, Lumea has spent the last 12 years trying to separate the man from the myth, and the digitisation of many historical newspapers has helped considerably in this regard.
Still celebrated today: ‘Emperor Norton’ makes an appearance at a parade in San Francisco on June 24, 2018 [Shutterstock]
Some of Norton’s most famous “proclamations” – the one in which he banned people from referring to his adoptive home as “Frisco” (a nickname for the city which may be a play on the word “frisk” as a word for “dance” and which was seen in print from 1950) for example – are most likely fake. Some may have been created by newspaper proprietors seeking readers or pushing their political agendas.
In 1869, The Oakland Daily News, for example, mocked San Francisco by publishing an obviously fake proclamation in which the Emperor called for an impossible bridge. The Emperor frequently issued counter-proclamations taking offence at such fake proclamations – and he took steps to oppose misinformation, such as when he appointed The Pacific Appeal newspaper, founded 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 Appeal our said organ, conditionally, that they are not traitors, and stand true to our colors”.
Joseph Amster, centre, dressed as Emperor Norton, sings ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ at the end of a parade to remember the great San Francisco 1906 earthquake and fire’s 110th anniversary on Friday, April 15, 2016, in San Francisco [Eric Risberg/AP]
Emperor Norton was a visionary, says Ganahl. He was also one of the first media-made celebrities. “A century and a half before we ever heard the name Kardashian, the Emp’s antics made for excellent copy, and he was hounded by the dozens of newspapers that called San Francisco home after the gold rush. What they didn’t directly observe, they made up in a very real ‘phase one’ of Fake News.
“By the time he died at the height of his ‘reign’, he was putting San Francisco on the map as a place that welcomed nuts and dreamers, anyone who coloured outside the lines. And so it remains today.”
Emperor Norton was only ever a local hero, but 150 years after his death, he remains known and loved throughout the Bay Area, says Lumea. “He is seen as a harbinger of San Francisco values, identifying with those on the margins, and fighting for the little guy. The fact that he was doing that from outside of power makes it all the more poignant.”
In 1859, a South African declared himself emperor of the United States | History
