"Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken without developing new evils requiring new remedies"
About this Quote
Progress, Taft warns, is not a clean ascent; it is renovation work, and every renovation kicks up dust. The line lands with the dry realism of a lawyer-president who distrusted utopian promises. “Substantial” is doing heavy lifting: he’s not talking about symbolic reform or moral posturing, but structural change - the kind that rearranges power, markets, and daily life. And when you rearrange those, you don’t just fix problems; you manufacture fresh ones.
The subtext is a rebuke to two comforting stories Americans like to tell themselves: that reform is a one-time purge, and that good intentions have a guaranteed moral surplus. Taft insists on the opposite. Every “better thing” arrives with side effects: regulation that curbs monopoly can also breed bureaucracy; industrial growth can raise living standards while generating exploitation and urban squalor; expanded federal capacity can protect the public and simultaneously threaten civil liberties. His sentence stages an almost clinical chain reaction: new remedies are not optional add-ons but the price of momentum.
Context matters. Taft governed in the Progressive Era, when trust-busting, labor unrest, immigration, and rapid industrialization forced the state to grow up fast. He wasn’t selling cynicism so much as a governing ethic: stay humble, expect unintended consequences, and build institutions that can iterate. The quote reads like an argument for constant maintenance over grand victory laps - progress as a series of trade-offs you manage, not a destination you declare.
The subtext is a rebuke to two comforting stories Americans like to tell themselves: that reform is a one-time purge, and that good intentions have a guaranteed moral surplus. Taft insists on the opposite. Every “better thing” arrives with side effects: regulation that curbs monopoly can also breed bureaucracy; industrial growth can raise living standards while generating exploitation and urban squalor; expanded federal capacity can protect the public and simultaneously threaten civil liberties. His sentence stages an almost clinical chain reaction: new remedies are not optional add-ons but the price of momentum.
Context matters. Taft governed in the Progressive Era, when trust-busting, labor unrest, immigration, and rapid industrialization forced the state to grow up fast. He wasn’t selling cynicism so much as a governing ethic: stay humble, expect unintended consequences, and build institutions that can iterate. The quote reads like an argument for constant maintenance over grand victory laps - progress as a series of trade-offs you manage, not a destination you declare.
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