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Lot Essay
A bust portrait by Pach Bros, New York, inscribed to a political ally.
Henry H. Merrick was head of the Chicago branch of the National Security League—the most prominent and influential U.S. military preparedness lobby during the First World War. Constituted mainly by businessmen, academics, and industrialists, the group advocated for universal conscription, an interstate highway system, the "Americanization" of immigrants and a militant form of patriotic education. Highly critical of the Wilson administration's unaggressive approach to the First World War, the N.S.L. found a close ally and supporter in Theodore Roosevelt; in a January 1918 address to the league, then-Colonel Roosevelt celebrated the group's military training camps as "the greatest universities of American citizenship in the country" and "the greatest factories of Americanism". Writing to Merrick on 28 August 1917, the former President sent his well-wishes to the city's soldiers embarking for the front lines in Europe: "All my four sons are across the water, and I only wish I were going across with the Chicago men". One of those four sons, Quentin, was downed over the skies over Germany less than a year later—a devastating loss for Roosevelt that likely hastened his own demise in early 1919.
Henry H. Merrick was head of the Chicago branch of the National Security League—the most prominent and influential U.S. military preparedness lobby during the First World War. Constituted mainly by businessmen, academics, and industrialists, the group advocated for universal conscription, an interstate highway system, the "Americanization" of immigrants and a militant form of patriotic education. Highly critical of the Wilson administration's unaggressive approach to the First World War, the N.S.L. found a close ally and supporter in Theodore Roosevelt; in a January 1918 address to the league, then-Colonel Roosevelt celebrated the group's military training camps as "the greatest universities of American citizenship in the country" and "the greatest factories of Americanism". Writing to Merrick on 28 August 1917, the former President sent his well-wishes to the city's soldiers embarking for the front lines in Europe: "All my four sons are across the water, and I only wish I were going across with the Chicago men". One of those four sons, Quentin, was downed over the skies over Germany less than a year later—a devastating loss for Roosevelt that likely hastened his own demise in early 1919.