The Square Pegs (22 page)

While he never traveled to the far-flung corners of his Empire, he was much in evidence about his capital city. He rode the municipal streetcars without cost. He was grateful for this free passage, but not beholden. He felt it his due. Once when a fellow passenger, an elderly lady, could not find her five-cent fare, Norton advised the conductor to move on. “Let her,” he said, “be a guest of the Empire.” On his occasional trips to Sacramento and other northern cities, his railroad or steamboat berths were occupied with the compliments of their owners.

Thus, unencumbered by the normal struggle for existence, Emperor Norton was able fully to enjoy the advantages of his lofty post. Day followed day through the years in placid parade. By force of habit he rose late, permitted a worshipful fellow boarder to help dress him, and then sauntered to the nearest bar for a light repast. In early afternoon he set out on foot to survey his happy dominion, often accompanied by wide-eyed children and almost always by two faithful dogs. These aged canines, city characters, were not of aristocratic pedigree. One, a black mongrel, was known as Bummer for his habit of cadging meals at taverns. The other, a dark-yellow collie, was known as Lazarus because he had risen to life after a near fatal fight. When Bummer was kicked to death by a drunk and Lazarus was poisoned, the San Francisco press published obituaries and the Virginia City newspaper carried a touching farewell by Mark Twain. Though reams of sentimental copy were to be produced about the Emperor’s attachment to the dogs, these accounts were, for the most part, unauthorized and inaccurate. Norton had little affection for Bummer and Lazarus, but graciously allowed them to become part of his daily retinue.

On his strolls, accepting the bows and curtsies of his subjects, the Emperor inspected civic improvements, chatted with pretty girls (he had an eye for a well-turned ankle, but remained a bachelor without heir), discussed law enforcement with police, looked in on delinquent merchants, paused to relax at chess in the Mechanic’s Library, attended a different church every week (so that there would be no wrangling for his favor among varied denominations), and constantly made his presence felt at all forums and political meetings.

During one election campaign, when a candidate for the Senate rose to appeal for votes, Norton commanded him to desist and be seated. “You don’t have to speak further,” Norton advised him, “because I hereby appoint you United States senator.”

On another occasion, as Allen Stanley Lane has related in his biography,
Emperor Norton
, he participated in a discussion of free love sponsored by the Lyceum of Self Culture. Upon being introduced, he remarked somewhat enigmatically that 82 per cent of all infants born in America were destroyed. “Take twenty-five square miles of land,” he continued. “Let it rain on that land twenty-four hours. Then turn every one of those drops of water into a baby. How many babies would there be?” It was not a rhetorical question. He demanded an answer. The dazed audience had none to give. Offended by this dim-witted reaction, Norton descended from the platform and marched out of the meeting.

During evenings, Norton was sometimes in evidence at the city’s playhouses. When he made his grand entrance minutes before curtain time and strode majestically to the orchestra seat reserved for him by the management, the audience came to its feet en masse in silent tribute. But more often his evenings were spent contemplating the problems of Empire. In his quiet room, far from the temptations of frivolity, he would sit down to his wooden table, take up his pen, and scratch out his historic proclamations.

At an early date in his reign he decided that “Mexico is entirely unfit to manage her own affairs, the country being in a constant state of internal distraction, anarchy and civil war.” To defend the peons from the avaricious Napoleon III, Norton appointed himself official “Protector of Mexico.” But after the brutal execution of Maximilian, Norton withdrew his championship of the proletariat. A people who could murder an Emperor dangerous precedent was too “unsettled” to deserve his protection.

He tempered justice with mercy. When John Brown was tried, Norton decided that “Brown was insane” and should not be harshly judged. Learning that, despite his opinion, Brown had been hanged, Norton summarily discharged the Governor of Virginia from his office. During the Civil War he ordered Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to come to him in California so that he might mediate the dispute. When they ignored his imperial command he went over their heads to Grant and Lee. During the Franco-Prussian War he sided with the Prussians and gave Bismarck constant advice. When the war ended he took credit for the peace. Some of his decrees were translated into German and appeared in the Austrian press. One ill-informed Vienna railroad employee actually wrote Norton in 1871, requesting the post of American ambassador to Austria.

Of all of the Emperor’s decrees, only one was to reflect his remarkable vision. For it was Norton who first suggested, in print, the San Francisco Bay bridge. Two problems, one personal and one municipal, motivated his inspiration. He enjoyed visiting Oakland, across the bay, but found the journey by ferry tedious and time consuming. Only a bridge could speed his commuting. Too, he was troubled by the rivalry between San Francisco and Oakland, each community wishing to become the terminus of the new Central Pacific Railroad. It was felt that the city failing to win the railroad terminal would be seriously deprived of commerce and population. Norton realized that a bridge might solve the problem. On August 18, 1869, he offered the
Oakland Daily News
the following proclamation:

“We, Norton I,
Dei Gratia
, Emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico, do order and direct, first, that Oakland shall be the coast termination of the Central Pacific Railroad; secondly, that a suspension bridge be constructed from the improvements lately ordered by our royal decree at Oakland Point to Yerba Buena… .”

Norton’s venture into the technical field of engineering was met with cries of “crazy,” but little more than a half century later, the bridge was constructed, and it spanned the bay just as Norton had suggested.

The great majority of his subjects appreciated his selfless interest in their welfare. Even the celebrated showed him marked respect. When Mark Twain returned in 1869 from the trip to the Mediterranean which was to produce Innocents Abroad, he announced that were he to make another such “pleasure excursion around the world and to the Holy Land” and had he “the privilege of making out her passenger list,” he would include among his favorite companions Bret Harte, the elder James Coffroth—and Norton I of San Francisco.

In 1892, when Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, published their novel
The Wrecker
, much of which was laid in San Francisco, they paid tribute to the city by recounting its treatment of a favorite son:

“Of all our visitors, I believe I preferred Emperor Norton; the very mention of whose name reminds me I am doing scanty justice to the folks of San Francisco. In what other city would a harmless madman who supposed himself emperor of the two Americas have been so fostered and encouraged? Where else would even the people of the streets have respected the poor soul’s illusion? Where else would bankers and merchants have received his visits, cashed his cheques, and submitted to his small assessments? Where else would he have been suffered to attend and address the exhibition days of schools and colleges? where else, in God’s green earth, have taken his pick of restaurants, ransacked the bill of fare, and departed scathless? They tell me he was even an exacting patron, threatening to withdraw his custom when dissatisfied; and I can believe it, for his face wore an expression distinctly gastronomical.”

Though “the imperial government” of Norton I was more indulgent than most autocracies, there were infrequent evidences of
l’èse majesté
and rebellion through the years. Once, at Petaluma, California, the Emperor received telegrams of an inciting nature from Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Again, there were several cables signed Victoria Regina, inquiring after his health and hinting at marriage. These and similar communications perpetrated by practical jokers plagued the Emperor throughout his reign. This type of irreverence toward royalty even infected the State Assembly at Sacramento. In January 1872 a pension bill in favor of General John A. Sutter was passed over vigorous opposition. In an effort to ridicule its passage, the enemies of the Sutter bill proposed one of their own: “The sum of two hundred and fifty dollars per month is hereby appropriated out of any funds in the State Treasury not otherwise appropriated for the relief of Emperor Norton the First… .” During the heated debate that followed, one Sutter supporter dared inquire: “Who is Emperor Norton the First, I would like to know?” Norton determined to answer the unbelievable question by making a personal appearance. Within a few days he charged into Sacramento, and began buttonholing legislators, explaining why they must support his monthly pension. But he was too late. His bill was already lost in the files of the Committee on Claims.

Most resistance to Norton came in the form of obstruction, and these rare flare-ups were most always the results of ignorance. On one train journey to Sacramento the Emperor made his way to the dining car for his evening meal. A new waiter thought his appearance suspect and refused to fill his order. The Emperor contained his temper and repeated his choice of menu. The waiter doubted that he had the money to pay for it. Money? The Emperor was apoplectic. He pounded the table with his cane, commanding the waiter to serve him before he disenfranchised the entire railroad. Fortunately a party of San Franciscans at a nearby table witnessed the scene and agreed that their ruler must be obliged at their expense. When news of this terrible incident reached the main offices of the Central Pacific the next day, the directors were hasty to make amends. They mailed Norton a lifetime free pass for use on Pullman or diner on any of their California trains.

Even more barbaric was the effort, on the night of January 21, 1867, to unseat him from his throne. A newly appointed and overzealous young policeman named Barbier arrested the Emperor on a charge of vagrancy. When the sputtering Norton revealed that he possessed almost five dollars, the officer revised his charge to insanity. Norton was dragged to the nearest station house and forced into a cell to await tests by the city alienist. The moment the Chief of Police heard of the mistaken arrest he personally released his monarch with profuse apology. The newspapers and periodicals of the West, in a single voice, denounced the outrage and extolled his reign. “Since he has worn the Imperial purple,” said the
Alta
, “he has shed no blood, robbed nobody, and despoiled the country of no one, which is more than can be said of any of his fellows in that line.”

As a new generation of loyal subjects grew to maturity they came to regard Emperor Norton as a romantic fixture. Their fathers had known his antecedents, but they themselves had not. And so they wondered, and conjectured fanciful beginnings, and embellished them in their gossip. To some he was a bastard son of Napoleon III or William IV of England. To others he was an heir discarded by George III. Norton heard these whisperings, and, in his dotage, did not deny them. An old friend who had known him in South Africa came visiting and asked him “to tell … how it was that he came by the title of Emperor, and why he wore the uniform he then had on.” Norton, after extracting a promise of secrecy, confided that he had been born of French royalty, and sent to South Africa as a measure of safety, with one John Norton as his guardian.

On December 31, 1879, he published a proclamation heralding the New Year and offering up “prayers of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

It was his last proclamation. On the early evening of January 8, 1880, he went out in a drizzle to attend a debate at the Academy of Sciences. He was in full uniform and in fine mood. At the age of sixty-two he walked still with vigorous stride. Those who saw him saw what Stevenson and Osbourne had seen “a portly, rather flabby man, with the face of a gentleman, rendered unspeakably pathetic and absurd by the great sabre at his side and the peacock’s feather in his hat.” As he approached the building where the debate was to be held, he suddenly stumbled and collapsed to the sidewalk. A passer-by ran to his aid and propped him up while shouting to others for a carriage. Norton was unconscious when he was taken into the receiving hospital, and minutes later he was dead.

In the morgue they emptied his pockets, and the contents were more eloquent than any biography: three dollars in silver coins, a two-dollar-and-fifty-cent gold piece, a five-franc note dated 1828, a sheaf of cables signed by Disraeli, Parnell, Diaz, and the Tsar of Russia, a certificate giving him ownership of 98,200 shares of stock in a mine, and several copies of his own imperial script. “Le Roi Est Mort” was the headline in the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

His funeral was the funeral of an Emperor. His old friends and most loyal subjects, the members of the Pacific Club, defrayed the $10,000 expenses involved in what became a day of municipal mourning. Eight thousand men and two thousand women and children followed his rosewood casket to the Masonic Cemetery, beneath Lone Mountain, where he was affectionately put to rest.

Fifty-four years later, the Masonic Cemetery was one of several burial grounds abolished by law. The grandsons of those who had first buried their Emperor now members of the Pacific Union Club undertook the final task of reburial. The Emperor’s remains were transferred to the Woodlawn Cemetery, just across the county line, and a marble tombstone was placed on the grave. On June 30, 1934, after the San Francisco Band had played, after infantrymen had exploded three volleys into the sky, after an American Legion bugler had finished taps, the inscription on the gravestone was unveiled: “Norton I … Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico … Joshua A. Norton 1819-1880.”

His Majesty would have been mightily pleased, for history had remembered him, and his adopted homeland had recognized him at last.