Page 20 - The Great Wall of China

While it didn’t exactly become a national sensation, the
reporters must have been a bit surprised… and perhaps more
than a little nervous… when the story was picked up by a
number of other papers throughout the country. Only the
New York Times seemed to question why, if China wanted
the wall torn down, wouldn’t they do it themselves?
Interestingly, there was one paper which didn’t run the story
at all… the Rocky Mountain News. Despite Wilshire reportedly
being part of the cabal which invented it, the story wasn’t in
the News that Sunday morning, nor the following day, or
any other day that week, or even in the Thursday edition of
the Rocky Mountain Weekly News. It’s impossible to know
why. Perhaps Wilshire had a sudden pang of conscience, or
perhaps his editor thought the story was suspect, or maybe
just boring.
One thing that’s certain is that the story would be even more
obscure than it is today, if not for an article penned by Harry
Lee Wilber for the North American Review in 1939.

Wilber’s reporting on the hoax
was so exaggerated and over
the top that it, in itself, was
essentially another hoax. The
article was reprinted in Great
Hoaxes of All Time in 1956 (which
is where I found it), and again
in the June 1970 issue of the
Denver Westerners Roundup.
The salacious reporting takes
a fairly benign (if unethical)
prank, and elevates it to the
level of international scandal.
To start with, Wilber painted
the story to be a much bigger
deal than it was, going so far
as to claim the Rocky Mountain
News ran it as a front page

20