Warner Fabian
| Samuel Hopkins Adams | |
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Adams in 1922
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| Born | January 26, 1871 Dunkirk, New York |
| Died | November 16, 1958 (aged 87) Beaufort, South Carolina |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Education | Hamilton College |
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Samuel Hopkins Adams (January 26, 1871 – November 16, 1958) was an American writer, best known for his investigative journalism and muckraking.
Adams was born in Dunkirk, New York. Adams was a muckraker, known for exposing public-health injustices. He was the son of Myron Adams, Jr., a minister, and Hester Rose Hopkins. Adams attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York from 1887-1891, he also attended a semester at Union College. In 1907 Adams divorced his wife, Elizabeth Ruffner Noyes, after having two daughters. Eight years later Adams married an actress, Jane Peyton. Adams was a close friend of both the investigative reporter Ray Stannard Baker and District Attorney Benjamin Darrow.
From 1891 to 1900, he was a reporter for the New York Sun where his career began, and then joined McClure's Magazine, where he gained a reputation as a muckraker for his articles on the conditions of public health in the United States. In 1904 Adams became an editorial staffer with McClure's Magazine working with Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker. Adams considered himself a freelance writer and used his writings to support himself. In 1905 Adams was hired by Collier's to prepared articles on patent medicines. In a series of 11 articles he wrote for the magazine in 1905, "The Great American Fraud", Adams exposed many of the false claims made about patent medicines, pointing out that in some cases these medicines were damaging the health of the people using them. The series had a huge impact and led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition of falsifications referred only to the ingredients of the medicine. This meant that companies were again free to make false claims about their products. Adams returned to the attack, and in another series of articles in Collier's Weekly, Adams exposed the misleading advertising that companies were using to sell their products. Linking his knowledge of newspapers with patent medicines, he wrote The Clarion (1914), which was critical of newspaper advertising practices and led to a series of consumer-protection articles in the New York Tribune. His service during World War I for the Committee on Public Information led to Common Cause (1919), a novel on a newspaper's battle against pro-Germans in Wisconsin.
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