Bureau of Municipal Research staffers sustained heroic wartime-battle morale decades later

Evidence

The students were filled with an esprit so strong that it seemed sometimes as if it must surely waft out the windows of 261 Broadway and melt some of the soot from the blackened granite of the Tweed Courthouse below. They believed in the importance of what they were doing; a half century later, rheumy eyes would light up and smiles would curl corners of wrinkled lips as they talked about it, and they talked in terms old soldiers reserve for old battles. “How would I sum up what we were doing?” one would say. “We were fighting to make democracy work, that’s what we were doing!” They were very proud of their position in the army of idealism. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 268

Categorization

• SEED: The durability of reformist esprit — how a professional-administration cohort re-experiences its newsletter-and-memo years as a war — is a lens worth an essay on the psychology of early-career idealists.