ABSTRACT
A decade after the bottom fell out of American prosperity, a vast new magazine enterprise, Time, Inc., invented Wendell Willkie. Actually Willkie, like Wilson and Hoover, used journalism just as journalism was using him. His mentors in Time brought to bear on that inventive task a new mode of moral instruction, the news as parable, that would transform the way Americans experienced the politics of conscience. Willkie's story can be seen in retrospect as marking a key transition in American politics: the decline of the parties as nominators. Moralizing candidates, coming in from the outside with their guns blazing at the "politicians", undercut rhetorically the public's confidence in the parties as groomers, winnowers, and endorsers of candidates. Organizationally, Willkie owed nothing but trouble to the Republican powers, that were; such organization as he had going into the convention was independent, amateur, unbeholden. It was a Willkie organization, not a Republican faction.
