How to Tame Your Tongue
In 1899 four newspaper reporters from Denver, Colorado set out to tear down the Great Wall of China. They almost succeeded. Literally. The four met by chance on a Saturday night in a Denver railway depot. Al Stevens, Jack Tournay, John Lewis, Hal Wilshire. They represented the four Denver papers: the Post, the Times, the Republican and Rocky Mountain News.
Each had been sent by his respective newspaper to dig up a story—any story—for the Sunday editions; so the reporters were in the railroad station, hoping to snag a visiting celebrity should one happen to arrive that evening by train.
None arrived that evening, by train or otherwise. The reporters started commiserating. For them, no news was bad news; all were facing empty-handed return trips to their city desks.
Al declared he was going to make up a story and hand it in. The other three laughed.
Someone suggested they all walk over to the Oxford Hotel and have a beer. They did.
Jack said he liked Al’s idea about faking a story. Why didn’t each of them fake a story and get off the hook?
John said Jack was thinking too small. Four half-baked fakes didn’t cut it. What they needed was one real whopper they could all use.
Another round of beers.
A phony domestic story would be too easy to check on, so they began discussing foreign angles that would be difficult to verify …
China was distant enough, it was agreed. They would write about China.
John leaned forward, gesturing dramatically in the dim light of the barroom. Try this one on, he said: Group of American engineers, stopping over in Denver en route to China. The Chinese government is making plans to demolish the Great Wall; our engineers are bidding on the job.
Harold was skeptical. Why would the Chinese want to destroy the Great Wall of China?
John thought for a moment. They’re tearing down the ancient boundary to symbolize international goodwill, to welcome foreign trade!
Another round of beers.
By 11:00 P.M. the four reporters had worked out the details of their preposterous story. After leaving the Oxford Bar, they would go over to the Windsor Hotel. They would sign four fictitious names to the hotel register. They would instruct the desk clerk to tell anyone who asked that four New Yorkers had arrived that evening, had been interviewed by reporters, had left early the next morning for California.
The Denver newspapers carried the story. All four of them. Front page.
In fact, the Times headline that Sunday read: GREAT CHINESE WALL DOOMED! PEKING SEEKS WORLD TRADE!
Of course, the story was a phony, a ludicrous fabrication concocted by four capricious newsmen in a hotel bar.
But their story was taken seriously, was picked up and expanded by newspapers in the Eastern U.S. and then by newspapers abroad.
When the Chinese themselves learned that the Americans were sending a demolition crew to tear down their national monument, most were indignant; some were enraged.
Particularly incensed were the members of a secret society, a volatile group of Chinese patriots who were already wary of foreign intervention.
They, inspired by the story, exploded, rampaged against the foreign embassies in Peking, and slaughtered hundreds of missionaries.
In two months, twelve thousand troops from six countries joined forces, invaded China with the purpose of protecting their own countrymen.
The bloodshed which followed, sparked by a journalistic hoax invented in a barroom in Denver, became the white-hot international conflagration known to every high school history student … as the Boxer Rebellion.1
The power of the word! as seen in Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the story.” Nations have risen and nations have fallen to the tongue. Lives have been elevated and lives have been cast down by the tongue. Goodness has flowed like a sweet river from the tongue, but so has the cesspool. The tiny tongue is a mighty force in human life indeed.
Realize our Accountability.
Realize our Vulnerability
Realize our Power for Good
Realize our Power for Harm
At 9:00 one Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, poor Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern as she was being milked, starting the great Chicago Fire, which blackened three and one half miles of the city, destroying over 17,000 buildings before it was checked by gunpowder explosions on the south line of the fire. The fire lasted two days and cost over 250 lives.
But, ironically, that was not the greatest inferno in the Midwest that year. Historians tell us that on the same day that dry autumn a spark ignited a raging fire in the North Woods of Wisconsin which burned for an entire month, taking more lives than the Chicago Fire. A veritable firestorm destroyed billions of yards of precious timber—all from one spark!