It seems that John Campbell Merriam may not have had a close relationship with his brother Charles E. Merriam Jr. (five years younger), who went on to University of Chicago as a political scientist and founder of the Social Science Research Council. Certainly, their intellectual trajectories were quite distinct: while Charles was a hardball political scientist, John Campbell was a paleontologist whose science verged into Christian mystical teleology (see Stock). Both John Campbell Merriam and his brother Charles E. Merriam Jr. spent their later years in Washington, D.C., where they influenced national policies in their chosen fields.