The Great American Fraud / The Patent Medicine Evil

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