Mary Sims traded a governor’s office for reform work at the Bureau

Evidence

But Mary’s ambitions were not for herself. She had sought out a job with a politician not because she was interested in politics but because she was interested in what politics could do. She was another of the moths who in the years before World War I hovered so thickly around the flame of idealism. In 1913, Cleveland and Allen visited Madison to study Wisconsin’s governmental structure. No one could explain it better than Miss Sims, the Governor said, and delegated her to show the visitors around. She had already become interested in the “efficiency and economy” movement. In the course of the tour, Cleveland and Allen talked to her about how they were trying to make democracy work, about fighting to free government to institute reforms that would really help people. Mary resigned as the Governor’s secretary and came to New York to work for the Bureau. In 1914 she was thirty—four and a half years older than Bob Moses—and was known to Bureau staffers and students for her friendliness, her quick wit and the depth of her belief in what they were doing. Bob Moses fell in love with her. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 291