Early Life and Education
Charles Merriam was born in Hopkinton, Iowa, on November 15, 1874, to Charles Edward Merriam and Margaret Campbell Kirkwood Merriam. The Merriams traced their lineage to Scottish immigrants who settled in Massachusetts in 1638. Charles E. Merriam, Sr. had been born in Princeton, Massachusetts, moved to Iowa in 1855, and served with the 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War. Charles and Margaret (both Presbyterians) were married in 1868. Charles E. Merriam, Sr. owned a dry goods store and was postmaster and president of the school board in Hopkinton. Charles Jr.'s elder brother was John C. Merriam (who became a noted paleontologist), and he had a younger sister, Susan Agnes Merriam.
Merriam attended public school in Hopkinton. He graduated from Lenox College in 1893 (his father was a trustee of the school), taught school for a year, and then returned to college to receive his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Iowa in 1895. He received his masters degree in 1897 and doctorate in 1900 from Columbia University. He studied at the University of Paris and the University of Berlin in 1899 while completing his Ph.D. Among his mentors from whom he adopted much of his early political thought were Frank Johnson Goodnow, Otto von Gierke, and James Harvey Robinson.
He married the former Elizabeth Hilda Doyle (of Constable, New York) in 1900.
Read more about this topic: Charles Merriam
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.”
—Henry Reed (1914–1986)
“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)