Caro frames public service as the arena where idealism is tested

Evidence

Robert Moses’ education was over. He was beginning the career in public service about which he so often had talked with so passionate an idealism. The quadrangles of Oxford were behind him. Instead of cloisters, there would be the arena. And one day in the summer of 1913, dressed in his clean white suit, Robert Moses carried his bright, shining idealism down to 261 Broadway and flung it on the table to find out what it was worth in the game of life. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Themantic echo of later Moses chapters — the transformation of idealism by power. — connects to: Quiet private leverage outperformed public denunciation in achieving reform — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 395