“One modest, but highly inventive, newspaper man forty years ago in a mining camp in Nevada, started a commotion of international and incalculable significance,” Harry Lee Wilber wrote in The North American Review. “Through sheer journalistic stunt, wholly innocent in its intent, he started the Boxer Rebellion in China!”
In “A Fake That Rocked the World,” the Denver-based musician goes on to describe a series of outlandish circumstances that led a local newspaper headline to turn up in China at the turn of the century.
“Destruction of the wall was such international interest,” Wilber explains, “that the story was cabled across seas without comment or verification. When it reached China, it incensed the Boxer so that they started a Boxer Rebellion.”
Wilber’s story, too, had legs. Seventeen years after initial publication, it appeared in the collection, Great Hoaxes of All Time. Three decades later, radio legend Paul Harvey repeated the tale of how a handful of fake newspaper articles spurred one of history’s most famous uprisings. Whether the songwriter otherwise best known for penning 1912’s largely forgotten "Back to Dear Old Denver Town” was aware that he was perpetrating a hoax of his own remains uncertain.
Aside from rather dramatically overstating its role in the course of human events, Wilber managed to get the story’s origin correct in broad strokes. While there’s no evidence of the Great Wall of China hoax’s contemporary arrival in its titular country, the intentional bit of fake news did manage to cause its share of waves on the domestic front.
The official story entails a quartet of Denver-based reporters – Al Stevens, Jack Tournay, John Lewis and Hal Wilshire – coincidentally converging downtown on a Saturday night in search of a story. The four men exited Union Station dejected, when their lead failed to emerge. Making their way to the nearby Oxford Hotel, the friendly competitors discussed the disappointing turn of events and the prospect of heading into the Sunday edition empty-handed.
It was Stevens who reportedly floated the idea of making something up, whole-cloth. Such a story could gain real traction in the local market, owing to the fact that the four reporters worked for competing papers.
"What's the matter with the great Chinese wall?” Lewis asked the other three, according to Wilber. “That sacred pile hasn't been in the news for ages. Why not a story around it? Let's tear it down!”
“Old Wall Must Go” declared the big, block letters of The Denver Post. The Denver Republican noted, “Builds Highway of Chinese Wall,” while The Denver Times explained, “Chicago to Demolish the Old Chinese Wall.” The last paper drew extensively on quotes from Chicago-based railroad man, Frank C. Lewis.
"I lived in China for four years," Lewis reportedly told the paper, "and during that time I was interested in building a great many miles of railroad."
The three articles (The Rocky Mountain News’ Wilshire apparently opted to sit this one out) told roughly the same story. The Chinese government was looking to tear down a portion of the Great Wall, using its stones to build a throughway. The great road was set to stretch from Nanjing to Siberia. Lewis, who sought a contract for the work, had brought the story to the Denver papers.
The tale quickly spread across the U.S., largely repurposed with credulity. Even the paper of record picked up on the story, though it did so cautiously, placing it at the end of the its “Topics of the Times” collection of interesting short items. The New York Times noted, tongue planted firmly in cheek,
News from China, even though it has tarried for refreshments at Denver and Chicago on the way here, has no right to be as hard to understand as was the dispatch published yesterday, announcing that an American syndicate has secured the contract for tearing down the great Chinese wall.
In spite of Wilber’s own reporting, the story appears to have largely died at the U.S. borders.
Sources:
A fake that rocked the world https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115061?read-now=1&seq=1
Fake News: 1899 Edition https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/fake-news-1899-edition
The Great Wall of China Hoax http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_great_wall_of_china_hoax
Topic of the Times https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/06/28/117926530.html?pageNumber=6