My late Aunt Frances, a 19th-century immigrant with the equivalent of today's sixth-grade education, had somehow absorbed a lot of quotable wisdom and was wont randomly to recite such texts as Hamlet's soliloquy and the opening lines of Richard III. She would frequently remark, quoting Ecclesiastes*, that "there's nothing new under the sun."

As a child, I doubted that she was right about that -- she having seen Henry Ford's first Model T and having lived at the dawn of the age of aviation and the motion picture craze.

My aunt was 25 when the First World War broke out and 50 at the inception of the Second War. She had just turned 60 when the Korean conflict erupted and, with a sad shake of her head -- perhaps remembering her cousin Father Michael Endl, who may have vanished in an early Nazi pogrom -- said, "There's nothing new under the sun." By the time of the Panmunjom cease-fire, I had become an avid student of history and had to admit that she was right.

If my aunt were alive now and could comprehend the state of the nation's political stasis, she would aver yet again that "there is nothing new under the sun." She would be backed up by Doris Kearns Goodwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism.** I do not recall if I ever heard my aunt quote George Santayana on the subject, but if she had known of his noted comment on the danger of not knowing history, surely she would have.

It is a fact that the kind of political wars just now hobbling American governance -- often with deleterious effects upon the lives of the poor and middle class -- have all happened before and with similar consequences. As Kearns Goodwin's meticulous and detailed recounting of late 19th- and early 20th-century American history demonstrates, Congress then had its own John Boenher in the person of Joe Cannon and its own Mitch McConnell in that of Nelson Aldrich -- the former two Speakers of the House, the latter party leaders in the U.S. Senate.

Apparently born to oppose any measure that might annoy the 1%, cause them to pay a cent more in taxes or cut into their fabulous wealth, Cannon and Aldrich did their bidding and so got re-elected term after term. The two of them ran their respective chambers as George C. Patton would later run the Third Army, i.e. by fear and retribution.

Cannon and Aldrich fought the reform initiatives of President Theodore Roosevelt, their own fellow Republican, counting such hard-won legislation as the Pure Food and Drug Act to be injurious to the true American way of life. They went on to oppose the government's acquisition of riparian land for the generation of cheap electrical power to improve the lives of struggling farmers and homesteaders, believing that the profit of private companies should always trump the needs of ordinary people. They called efforts to establish a minimum wage "socialistic" as such initiatives are now called "class war."

Nowhere does Kearns Goodwin in this exquisitely researched 910-pager comment on the contemporary repetition of the history she documents. But that thought will dawn quickly upon the mind of the discerning and well-informed reader. One is tempted to make the Santayana allusion here, but current political leaders cannot be ignorant of the major points she revisits. Thus they must be content to repeat that sorry past. They must revel in the defeat of legislation and the skewing of public policy that rewards the affluent and punishes the poor and middle-class.

House Majority leader Eric Cantor, having stood firm against the extension of unemployment compensation on the grounds that it makes the unemployed lazy at the expense of taxpayers, spent thousands of dollars to send himself to the Davos conference that all self-important people feel they must attend. I trust that a reporter is just now investigating how much those taxpayers without their knowledge may have invested in that junket.

What's missing from today's reprise of the Roosevelt-Taft era is the corps of tough-minded journalists whose lives and work Kearns Goodwin also recounts. Investigative journalism did not begin with Woodward and Bernstein. It was alive, well and at work in the late 1880s and '90s and for at least the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

Investigative journalism is an expensive proposition that entail paying a living wage and expenses to reporters who might produce only one or two articles in a year, each often with a 20,000-word count. Media moguls of today are loath to fund that kind of enterprise when the low-cost bread-and-circuses news model of carjackings, inner-city shootings, professional sports and, in the case of popular magazines, the cult of personalities is perceived to be more crowd pleasing and therefore will harvest more ad dollars.

They cannot be expected, these Roger Ailes-Rupert Murdoch types, to do what S.S. McClure did a century and more ago with his deservedly famous McClure's Magazine that featured such talent as Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens. Indefatigable and focused, they reported and wrote stories of great substance and import, which revealed abysmal social and economic injustices.

Those articles were read in half a million households across the nation and helped put pressure on politicians to do the right thing -- not that they always did so. That recalcitrance was likewise reported.

As a former journalist myself, I read Kearns Goodwin's account of the so-called muckrakers with mixed emotions, celebrating even at this remove the affect and effect of their superior journalism, yet mourning the present state of news gathering and reporting. Years ago, I had the privilege of working in the same Detroit Free Press city room as Billy Bowles, Remer Tyson, Dolly Katz and Greg Skwira -- names no longer known to newspaper readers. But those colleagues, along with Jim Risen, now of the New York Times, remain in my memory as exemplars of the gold standard of reporting.

Woe betide a wrongdoer whose wrongdoing became the target of a Billy Bowles investigation. Bowles spent most of seven years patiently gathering, sifting and organizing a set of unlikely facts that finally fingered a wife-killer, helping police and the FBI track him down in Pago Pago. Bowles never forgot and never gave up. His research was transposed from a mountain of notebooks into a mountain range of 3x5 cards. His work started out like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle scattered willy-nilly across a table. He toiled over it until the picture emerged.

That's what's largely missing in the McDonalds-Burger King world of today's news organizations. It is providential that such periodicals as the Atlantic, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books continue to be published. Would that their articles of substance were more widely read. Perhaps the broad-as-a-barn-door target that is the Chris Christie bund will spawn a new generation of muckrakers, there being plenty of muck there and elsewhere to rake.

Meanwhile, what progressive politicians remain are outnumbered, outgunned and outsmarted by those who get and spend under the dread aegis of Citizens United -- and they get away with who-knows-what in the process. Both Gov. Christie and the Brothers Koch should be relieved to know that Bowles has not been assigned to investigate them.

That must leave Cannon and Aldrich smiling ear to ear in their mausoleums. Lo, there is nothing new under the sun.

*Ecclesiastes 1:9b

**New York, NY. Simon & Schuster. 2013