The Great American Fraud

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. For fraud, exploited by the skilfulest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade. Should the newspapers, the magazines and the medical journals refuse their pages to this class of advertisement, the patent medicine business in five years would be as scandalously historic as the South Sea Bubble[1], and the nation would be the richer not only in lives and money, but in drunkards and drug-fiends saved. The Great American Fraud, October 7, 1905

Samuel Hopkins Adams ( 1871 –  1958 ) was an American writer, best known for his investigative journalism.


From 1891 to 1929, he was a reporter for the New York Sun 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 a series of eleven articles he wrote for Collier's Weekly 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 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.
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 another series of articles in Collier's Weekly, Adams exposed the misleading advertising that companies were using to sell their products.
[1]The Governor and Company of the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South Seas and other parts of America, and for the encouragement of fishing, commonly called the South Sea Company, was a British joint-stock company founded in 1711, created as a public-private partnership to consolidate and reduce the cost of national debt. The company was also granted a monopoly to trade with South America, hence its name. At the time it was created, Britain was involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and Spain controlled South America. There was no realistic prospect that trade would take place and the company never realised any significant profit from its monopoly. Company stock rose greatly in value as it expanded its operations dealing in government debt, peaking in 1720 before collapsing to little above its original flotation price; this became known as the South Sea Bubble.

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.

Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a derogatory term to condemn any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.