Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Emperor Norton

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

After a San Francisco real estate mogul went bankrupt, he reinvented himself as the Emperor of the United States – and became the city’s most celebrated resident.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and this is Short Stuff.

Let's go. All right, Emperor Joshua Norton, the maybe first, but at least one of the early great eccentrics of San Francisco, California. Yeah, it's possible he was one of, it's possible he was the first, but it's actually kind of unlikely if you think about it.

Yeah, but it is so funny to think about the fact that this was in the 1850s and beyond, and San Francisco was still San Francisco. Yeah, I'd heard of this guy. I didn't know much about him. I just knew he was an eccentric, beloved San Franciscan, but when you dig into this guy,

it just gets better and better. Yeah, it's pretty great. So he was, like you said, his name is Joshua Norton, he was born in England, and his parents traveled to South Africa to settle there in 1820 as part of a settlement scheme, and by settle, I mean, show up in Interlo. Colonized?

Yeah. There you go, and they, I guess, I didn't understand why they left or he left, but at some point he made his way to San Francisco. I believe for the gold rush, so I guess he probably left himself, and he made himself pretty wealthy man pretty quick by 1852 within just three years of arriving.

He was one of the wealthy reputable citizens of San Francisco. Yeah. End of story. Yeah, he was in real estate early on, but in late December, or I guess just late 1852, there was a famine in China, and they placed a ban on rice exports to other countries.

Pretty sensible. Yeah, so there was a shortage of rice as a result in the US and in San Francisco where they love their rice. It is the San Francisco treat and always has been. Right, they do a little something special to it, but yeah, it's basically rice. So Norton heard that there was a ship coming to California from Peru that had like 200,000 pounds of rice.

He saw a business investment opportunity and said, all right, I'm gonna buy all this rice, I'm gonna corner the rice market, and I'm gonna get even richer, which he did, he bought this entire shipment. However, a bunch of more ships came from Peru in short order. Yeah, he didn't know about those coming.

No, and they had a bunch of rice, and then the prices went back to normal, and he was just stuck with a bunch of rice, and eventually in pretty short order, I think had to file for bankruptcy. Yeah, so he went from super wealthy San Franciscan to bankrupt San Franciscan from one bad business decision, which is why you don't wanna put all your eggs

in one basket, right? That's right. Or all of your rice on one ship from Peru. Right. So he kinda dropped out of San Francisco society. Everybody lost track of him, and after a year or two, he reemerged, and when he reemerged, he was a little different,

a little off compared to how he had been before, and one of the first things he did was distribute letters to the newspapers around San Francisco, declaring himself Emperor Norton I of the United States. Right. And the story would kind of end there. It would have just been a crackpot who distributed leaflets, and no one would know about it

because it would have been totally lost to history if one of those San Francisco papers, the bulletin, hadn't taken him up on this offer and printed his letter, his proclamation, and it kicked off a tradition around San Francisco of basically not just printing Emperor Norton's proclamations, but also just reporting on him and his doings and what he was up to at any given time.

It was kinda, it became a San Francisco media tradition. Yeah, and I guess there was just something about San Francisco even back then where the residents roundly were, I guess, probably kind of entertained by the sky and accepted him and revered him and embraced him as one of their kind of wacky locals. Exactly, maybe the wackiest local of all. Back then, probably so.

He would go around town and he wore a military uniform, and even the, I love this, even the Army officers at the, based at the Presidio there, gave him some like epaulets and things like that to put on his uniform. Yeah. It was pretty awesome. He sat with a peacock feather and he had a couple

of dogs named Bummer and Lazarus that would, I mean, he sounds like this could be San Francisco 2019 as well. Sure, sure. That Bummer and Lazarus thing, though, that is contested. There is a plaque in San Francisco by the, what's the pyramid building? Trans Union?

Trans America? Trans America. There's a plaque there commemorating Bummer and Lazarus and it specifically says they were not Norton's dogs. They were their own, sometimes, possibly, but they were definitely their own equal celebrities to Emperor Norton. They were their own crew that may or may not have

overlapped with Emperor Norton, but they deserve their own short stuff too, actually. Yeah, I'm curious about the name Bummer for back then, what that must have meant, I don't know. I don't know either. But the newspapers would also report on what they did too. Like there was at least, apparently, I've read in Atlas Obscura,

there was at least one article that wrote on how they had stolen a bone from another dog. Like that's what you could pick up the San Francisco papers and read about, but it was part of the city's pride in every aspect of it, you know? All right, well, let's take a short break and we're gonna come back and talk about some of his proclamations and how he went about town

right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All righty, so Emperor Norton, and by the way, in 1861, he added the title Protector of Mexico to his name after the French invaded Mexico, so. Did you know the French invaded Mexico? I don't know.

I did not. I don't think I did. But it didn't, I mean, I don't know. There was so much invading going on back then. Nothing surprises me anymore. It's true. Just two weeks ago, it was the Dutch. Yeah, exactly.

So he's hanging around San Francisco. He's got his outfit. He's, over the course of his reign, I guess you could say, he had some wacky declarations, and some that ended up kind of making sense. He abolished Congress, or called for the abolishing of Congress. He dissolved the United States of America as a whole.

Which makes it tricky to be the emperor of the United States. I didn't quite see how he rectified those two. I don't think he did. OK. He dissolves and abolish the two political parties. Pretty sensible. But then one thing he did was kind of interesting. He ordered a survey.

He was committed to finding a way to connect Oakland and San Francisco, whether by bridge or by tunnel. And he ordered a survey even in 1872 to try and figure this out, which ended up being pretty relevant later on. Yeah, he said there's going to be a great basketball team one day over in Oakland. And San Francisco needs to have a way

to lay claim on that team. Oh, that's true. He also ordered a suspension bridge be built from Oakland to God Island to San Francisco too. So he was very interested in connecting Oakland to San Francisco. And that was part of the civic attention, I guess, that he paid to the city.

He was known for inspecting sidewalks and streets and making sure they were in proper repair. And the city loved this guy. He actually once proclaimed that if you called San Francisco Frisco, it was a high misdemeanor. And you could be fined $25, which these days is more than $500. So he really meant it, right? Yeah, I love that that was even foreboding back then,

because it's long been known that you don't say Frisco. Yeah, this might be the origin of it, actually. That's pretty cool. And like I said, the city really did love him. He ate for free at all of the city's best restaurants. If there was an opening of a show, they would save a seat for him. The city just loved him so much so that he was once

committed by a police officer. And the city just had this huge outcry against it. Yeah, I think, well, they got out, because the police chief, I guess, was like, you can't lock up Emperor Norton. I think my favorite part of the whole thing, though, is he issued his own currency. And it was accepted.

Yeah, isn't that great? Oh, that's amazing, man. I want to be this guy. But what's neat? Well, there's just a couple of steps you need to take there, Chuck. You too can do that. You need to get some epaulets and make some money.

You're already beloved, so check one. All right. So this guy, Emperor Norton, is hanging around San Francisco. He's loved. He is issuing his own currency. He eats at all of the city's best restaurants. One of the things that struck me about this guy is he doesn't seem to have taken advantage of it,

because when he died. Except for eating for free and issuing his own money? Well, I'm saying he wasn't like, oh, you guys are going to take this money. Let's see what all I can do with this. You know what I mean? He just seems to have kind of done enough to live comfortably and gotten by.

But when he died, he dropped dead at the corner of California and what is now Grant Avenue, which is between Nob Hill and the financial district, age 61. Just dropped dead on the street. And when they went to go search his room at the boarding house, I mean, he had a collection of walking sticks and canes that he would carry around with him, some hats, and a $2.50 gold piece.

So he wasn't a hog, it sounds like. He was very much committed to looking over San Francisco and making sure it was in good shape. Yeah, and they ended up taking care of him post-mortem even. Originally, he was going to be buried in a popper's grave and the Pacific Club, which was a businessman's association back then. They may still be around for all I know.

Maybe they're part of the problem in San Francisco. They said, you know what? He should be buried in a Rosewood casket and we're going to have a great funeral procession. And in 1880, January 10, 30,000 of 230,000 residents attended this funeral procession. That's amazing. Even more attended his exclamation

because he was buried at the Masonic Cemetery and they moved the Masonic Cemetery, probably to make way for Uber's offices or something like that. And everybody was moved to Colma, California. Well, Colma, California, they had a reburial and something like, I think, 60,000 people showed up for that one. Amazing. Yeah, and they flew the flags at half mass.

This is 50 years after this guy has died. He was still that revered and still is today by some people in San Francisco. Oh, of course. Yeah, San Francisco loves to embrace their local eccentrics. I love it. So he, like we said, they have built the Bay Bridge now. There is a tunnel with public transportation.

So those two things came true that he was looking into. And then since then, he's been immortalized in a lot of literature and plays over the years, including Mark Twain, even, who lived in San Francisco at the time. He was clearly smitten with the guy as well. Yeah, he shows up as the king in Huckleberry Finn. That character is named after him.

There's no less than three operas and a musical written about him. He's beloved. Also, there's a episode of Bonanza. This is the weird cherry on top, I think. It basically tells the story of the time he was committed and released. And he, like the character's name, is Emperor Norton.

It just so happens that they coincided in the Bonanza timeline. And Emperor Norton's real-life timeline coincided in this episode of Bonanza, which I have to see. It's called, well, I don't know what it's called. Well, I know that I got to see it, too. I do know that Mark Twain was on the show, even, not the real Mark Twain, obviously.

It was probably Hal Holbrook, I guess. I hope so. There's nobody who could do a Mark Twain like him. Or Val Kilmer. There's nobody who can do a Mark Twain like Hal Holbrook. I got nothing against Val Kilmer. Well, that's not true. Oh, yeah, that old grudge.

That time he shoved you into the street. Yep. Shouldn't have done that, Val. I got nothing else. Nothing else over here. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Short Stuff. Short Stuff, away. The Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's

How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.