DID SAN FRANCISCO BUY NORTON A NEW SUIT?

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V25 2022 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 25, Number 21, May 22, 2022, Article 28

Bibliophiles and researchers are quite familiar with how conjecture, speculation and outright lies gradually morph into "facts" accepted by future generations. In a recent article, John Lumea of the Emperor Norton Trust examines how an often repeated claim about Norton's suit may have had its origins in a 1927 booklet. Here's an excerpt. -Editor

Herbert_Asbury_The_Barbary_Coast_1933_front_cover

For nearly a century, those carrying forward Emperor Norton's story — not all, but enough to make it stick — have included amongst their readily accepted and blithely repeated greatest hits the claim that, when the Emperor's uniform became tattered, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the City's elected government, bought him a new one.

If such a momentous thing had taken place, one would expect to see it contemporaneously documented in local newspapers of the day or in the official Municipal Reports of the City and County of San Francisco.

Over the last couple of decades, many online accounts of the Emperor — including the Wikipedia entry — have used the same sentence (or some very close version of it) to transmit this claim:

"When his uniform began to look shabby, the Board of Supervisors, with a great deal of ceremony, appropriated enough money to buy him another, for which the Emperor sent them a gracious note of thanks and a patent of nobility in perpetuity for each Supervisor."

Almost always, this sentence is quoted blind and without documentation of the claim itself. In fact, the sentence is plagiarized from the one-page passage on Emperor Norton that appears in Herbert Asbury's 1933 book, The Barbary Coast.

As in The Gangs of New York, Asbury provides a slender bibliography at the end of The Barbary Coast, too. He prefaces the bibliography by saying that [a] great deal of the material in this book comes from old-time San Franciscans and has never before been published. He goes on to say that the list that follows are those of the [s]everal hundred books and other published sources…consulted that were especially helpful.

The list includes newspapers. It also includes Benjamin E. Lloyd's 1876 book Lights and Shades in San Francisco, which has a brief section about Emperor Norton.

Dressler Emperor Norton of the United Stsates booklet cover

But, the only resource on the list that is explicitly about the Emperor is Albert Dressler's little booklet, Emperor Norton: Life and Experiences of a Notable Character in San Francisco, 1849–1880 — which Dressler self-published in 1927.

This may be where the story of a City-supplied uniform for the Emperor got its start.

Lloyd describes the Emperor's uniform — but says nothing about any new uniform or who might have provided it.

THE BOOK BAZARRE

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