In 1859, a bankrupt rice trader walked into a San Francisco newspaper office and demanded that they print a proclamation declaring him Emperor of the United States. The newspaper printed it. The city went along with it for the next twenty-one years.

His name was Joshua Norton. He was born in England in 1818, raised in South Africa, and arrived in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush in 1849. He made a fortune in real estate. He lost it three years later trying to corner the rice market with a single shipload from Peru. Two more shiploads arrived a week later. The price collapsed. By 1856 Norton was bankrupt and homeless. He disappeared from the city for a few years. When he returned, in September 1859, he was the Emperor.

On the seventeenth of September, 1859, he hand-delivered a typed letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, it began, I, Joshua Norton, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States. The Bulletin printed it on the front page. They thought it was funny.

Norton lived in a single room in a Commercial Street boarding house. He wore a worn military uniform with gold epaulettes and carried a sword. He paid for his meals in restaurants with his own self-printed currency, and the restaurants accepted it. The local Board of Supervisors voted him a new uniform when his old one wore out. In 1866 he expanded his title and named himself Protector of Mexico. He issued imperial decrees: in 1859 he ordered the dissolution of the United States Congress. In 1869 he abolished the Republican and Democratic parties. In 1872 he ordered the construction of a bridge across San Francisco Bay.

Many of these decrees were not written by Norton. They were written by the editors of the local papers, who used his name to push their own political agendas. He almost certainly knew. He almost certainly did not mind.

Mark Twain met him in San Francisco. Twain modeled the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on him. Norton died on a Commercial Street sidewalk on the evening of the eighth of January, 1880. The next morning, ten thousand citizens of San Francisco came to view his body. The Bay Bridge that Norton had decreed in 1872 was finally built sixty-four years later, in 1936. There is still a campaign to rename it the Emperor Norton Bridge.

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