Youth and Jewishness made Moses a lonely social outcast at Yale

Evidence

Not yet seventeen years old when he sat in Dwight Hall listening to President Arthur Twining Hadley’s opening address, he was two years younger than most of his classmates. Men from the same prep school generally roomed together as freshmen, but while the five other men in 1909 from Mohegan Lake “were fond of Bob, they kind of regarded him,” in the words of a classmate, “as a young boy”—and they didn’t invite him to room with them. In his freshman year, he boarded alone in a doctor’s house near the campus; if he participated in any extracurricular activities, or linked his arms with classmates to dance down Chapel Street and cheer Ted Coy for his three touchdowns against Princeton, or if he came rushing out of his room at the cry of “Riot!” to help freshmen overturn trolley cars and pelt policemen with water bombs, nobody noticed him. Boys selected their sophomore roommates from the friends they had made at Yale; in his sophomore year, Bob Moses again roomed alone, this time in a dormitory. Lonely, he frequently hung around the suite in another dormitory in which the Mohegan Lake alumni lived. Classmates remember him in his first two years as “diffident,” “quiet” and “shy.” One of the wealthy prep-school graduates who roomed in the big, friendly suites in Vanderbilt, most prestigious of the dormitories, would recall him as “almost a recluse.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 165

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the puzzle that launches Caro’s biography: how does this shy, excluded recluse become the ruthless Power Broker? Animal spirits tempered by rejection. — connects to: Yale’s social pyramid excluded outsiders so harshly it made classmates weep — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 163; Robert Moses rose within Yale partly enabled by being Jewish and excluded elsewhere — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 203; Moses was socially warm and admired despite his intense study habits — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 198 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Robert Moses rose within Yale partly enabled by being Jewish and excluded elsewhere #expands (0.90) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 203
• Moses was socially warm and admired despite his intense study habits #contradicts (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 198
• Moses’s self-imposed scholarly isolation paradoxically won him his classmates’ admiration #contradicts (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 167
• Young Moses already showed the obsessive, self-isolating dedication that marked his later career #expands (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 166