As two political scientists noted in their study of the discipline in 1985, "Merriam's hand can be seen in virtually every facet of modern political science." "As much as any single scholar during this period, Merriam set the standard for how American democracy should be studied within the academy" was the assessment of Merriam's thinking on the discipline by another political scientist in 2008. The political scientist Gabriel Almond concluded, "The Chicago school is generally acknowledged to have been the founding influence in the history of modern political science, and Charles E. Merriam is generally recognized as the founder and shaper of the Chicago school." Merriam was a leading advocate of the use of data and quantitative analysis in the practice of political science (even though he himself had almost no training in mathematics or statistics), and he founded the behavioralistic approach to political science. Merriam "denied the utility of theory" and advocated instead a "practical" political science aimed at creating a more harmonious, democratic, and pluralistic society. A corollary to this thinking was his "vision of social scientists as technical advisors to society's political leaders." Merriam also deeply influenced the administration of political science in academia. He assembled a faculty that represented some of the best scholars of the day, and he and the faculty produced some of the brightest political scientists of the next generation, creating a department that dominated the discipline for 30 years. His influence was such that the department's structure, personnel, and reputation largely did not survive his retirement in 1940. He also pushed the discipline to move away from European-style theoretical discussion and into actual research, and he established the first social science interdisciplinary research institutes in the United States. He was also a leader in pursuing private grants and foundation money as a means of funding this research. According to Harold Lasswell, Merriam also promoted use of concepts from psychology to the field of political science. Merriam was a critic of the states system in the United States. He argued that the states system was a problem for cities, as the state governments neither governed the cities nor allowed the cities to govern themselves. Local political career Merriam was a member of the Chicago City Charter Convention of 1906. He was commissioned by the City Club of Chicago in 1906 to study Chicago's tax system, and later served as a vice president of