Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
American ‘emperor’ with a Cape connection
Norton to be celebrated in the US 13
AMERICA, the land of opportunity, has produced only one emperor and he was from Cape Town.
The title of emperor was claimed and sustained by Joshua Norton, a South African who moved to the US from Cape Town in the middle of the 19th century.
Norton’s 200th birthday commemoration is being celebrated in San Francisco tomorrow.
Norton’s career as eccentric emperor, the mad monarch, will be illustrated by speeches, museum exhibits, dinners and walkabouts in places he frequented in the San Francisco.
Homage will be paid, sometimes somewhat tongue- incheek, to Norton as a legend, poet and prophet of sorts deserving greater posthumous recognition and honour.
For instance, there is demand by his fans to rename the San Francisco Oakland bridge after him because he was the first person to announce the need for the bridge.
Norton became a celebrity when San Francisco was a gold rush town. There he became a star by the role of emperor from 1859 to 1880.
His act was so entertaining that journalists reported his goings-on in the newspapers. He was discussed by writers such as Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson and by the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize, Sweden’s Selma Lagerlof.
When he died, his funeral was the biggest in the city’s history.
Before settling in America, Norton led a globe-trotting life. He was born in England, but his parents moved to South Africa when he was 2 years old, participants in the 1820 settler colonisation of the Eastern Cape.
The family later moved to Cape Town and his father was a successful chandler and merchant. But after the death of his parents and the enticing “get rich quick” reports of the 1849 gold rush in California, he sailed over to the new Eldorado. He flourished as a successful businessman.
Later, with the growing Chinese immigrant community in mind, Norton invested his fortune in attempting to corner and monopolise the rice market. He over-reached and went bankrupt.
The shock lead to a nervous breakdown and, it is said, he became mad, but not depressed. The madness appeared to take the form of delusions of grandeur and paranoia.
Thinking big, he dressed himself in imperial regalia, spoke pompously as an orator and, as a stylish writer, pro- claimed himself Emperor of America.
Norton wore an elaborate blue uniform with gold-plated epaulettes, an imposing hat with a peacock feather and carried a sceptre-like cane.
Norton issued decrees, sent messages to Congress, issued banknotes in his name, proclaimed himself protector of Mexico, intervened to calm down racial tensions and communicated with other “leaders”, such as Queen Victoria.
He was also rumoured to have had a Napoleonic connection at a time when the Napoleonic heir, the prince imperial, was killed in the Zulu wars.
Norton has been featured in many books about the early days in San Francisco. He represented the American capacity to reinvent oneself as described, for instance, in one of the great American novels, the Great Gatsby.
Norton was a myth-maker, moving from prosaic busi- ness activities to the more poetic world of illusionism and “no business like show-business”.
Since Norton’s time many other South Africans have followed him in seeking fame and fortune in America.