Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958): Journalist and Muckraker

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS was an American writer and muckraker. The muckrakers (a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt) were writers of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century who exposed the corruption of businesses or government to the public. Often accused of being socialists or communists, they played a significant role in social justice movements by constantly reporting on the dark corners of American society, especially corporate America.¹ We might say that they were the Michael Moores of their day. Adams was widely known for his writings on public health and patent medicines; he is often given much of the credit for the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

Adams was born in Dunkirk, New York State, and graduated from Hamilton College. For some years, he worked as a reporter for the New York Sun. In 1900, he joined the staff of McClure's Magazine, a popular illustrated monthly. The magazine was both political and literary. Literary writers included such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, and Mark Twain. The political writers included such leading muckrakers as Ida M. Tarbell, Roy Stannard Baker, and Upton Sinclair. Adams joined the latter group and began writing on public health issues. In 1905, he moved to Collier's Weekly, where he wrote a series of 11 searing and sensational articles on “The Great American Fraud,” the patent medicine business. He exposed many of the false and even ridiculous claims made by patent medicine manufacturers and showed that these medicines frequently harmed rather than helped those who took them. The series had a huge impact and was published as a book in 1906.² The book begins,

Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.^2(p1)

In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition of falsifications referred only to the ingredients of patent medicines, not claims as to their efficacy. Adams returned to the attack with another series of articles in Collier's Weekly, revealing the false claims of advertisers.³

Adams continued to write on public health issues, as in this article for the Journal of the American Public Health Association, but he also wrote many magazine stories, novels and mysteries, and biographies, political, and historical works. Perhaps his best-known novel is Revelry, based on the scandals of the Harding administration. He wrote 2 sexually explicit novels under the pseudonym Warner Fabian, and both were bestsellers. In all, he published dozens of books and hundreds of articles and short stories. After a remarkably successful and prolific writing career, Adams died at his home in South Carolina in 1958.