Wallace hailed from the conservative state of Iowa, born into a religious family that became, during his youth, highly influential in American farming communities. Leadership was part of the Wallace DNA. Wallace’s father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, served as the secretary of agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and was a journalist and publisher as well. Young Henry Wallace grew up on a farm, graduated from Iowa State University in 1910, and began writing for his family’s newspaper—Wallaces’ Farmer.
In the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to Ilo, Wallace began experimenting with hybrid corn seeds, and in 1926 he created Hi-Bred Corn. The seed spawned hearty stalks and high yields, and soon millions of rows of Wallace corn were reaching up to the sun across America and abroad. The company made Wallace fabulously rich, though he lived ascetically. During the Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—young Wallace remained a teetotaler.
His family background and success in farming brought Wallace to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt. Days after Roosevelt became the thirty-second president in 1933, he offered Wallace a cabinet post as secretary of agriculture, and from the early days of FDR’s presidency, Henry Wallace was a rising star of the New Deal movement.
Wallace also earned a reputation as a first-rate eccentric. He dressed in dusty wrinkled suits, drank milk made out of soybeans, and was skilled in the art of throwing a boomerang. He was a font of seemingly far-fetched ideas, some of which would prove remarkably prescient. He imagined a day, for example, when people would wear wristbands that could both tell the time and deliver news, and a pill that would contain all the nutrients of a full meal. Long before many Americans had heard of tennis, Wallace had mastered a mean stroke. Once, while sparring in a boxing ring in a gym, he famously knocked out Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana. But early on, Wallace’s eccentricities served only to burnish his reputation.
One day in the early 1930s Wallace was visiting a museum dedicated to the work of the artist Nicholas Roerich, at 310 Riverside Drive in New York. There he met Roerich himself for the first time. Roerich was Russian born, and had come to the United States in 1920. By then he had gained fame for his explorations into untamed lands, his spiritual writings, and his art. With his wild, flowing goatee, he had the appearance of an aging mystic. Even by 1920s standards, when eccentricity was in vogue, Roerich took individuality to an extreme. Once in 1927, he disappeared in Asia for eight months. Newspapers chronicled the mystery, until he unexpectedly reappeared in Mongolia. On another occasion, officials in India refused to allow him to enter their country for fear he was a Russian spy.
Days into Henry Wallace’s tenure as secretary of agriculture, he wrote Roerich, addressing him as “Dear Guru.” “I have been thinking of you holding the casket—the sacred most precious casket,” Wallace wrote. “And I have thought of the New Country going forth to meet the seven stars under the sign of the three stars. And I have thought of the admonition ‘Await the Stone.’” He signed the letter, “In great haste of this strange maelstrom which is Washington.”
A collection of letters to Roerich attributed to Wallace date from the 1930s, letters full of incomprehensible innuendos and hints of the occult. Washington figures were referred to in veiled terms: the “flaming one,” the “sour one,” the “wavering one.” The letters spoke of “earth beat, the Indian rhythm of ancient America,” and “fire from the heights.” Only once in his life would Wallace ever comment on these missives, in an interview around 1950. The letters, he said, were “unsigned, undated notes, which I knew I never sent to Nicholas Roerich, but there were a few letters addressed to Nicholas Roerich signed by me and dated which were written in rather high-flown language.”
In 1935 Wallace nominated Roerich for the Nobel Peace Prize and employed the artist-philosopher, sending him on a quixotic mission to Central Asia to search for plant life, on the payroll of the US Department of Agriculture. Roerich sped off with his wife and an entourage, and began to engage in activities that made local officials in Asia anxious. “The gist of the whole thing was that Roerich was playing international politics over there,” Wallace later recalled. What made Roerich dangerous was his followers, Wallace believed. “When I use [the word] followers, I mean followers of the type of the most extreme Communists or most extreme Catholics or Fascists or Hitlerites—completely and utterly devoted fanatics.”
Soon American diplomats in the region were reporting on Roerich’s activities. Wallace became panicked. He ended funding for the trip and wrote Roerich, saying, “There must be no publicity whatever about [the] recent expedition. There must be no quoting of correspondence or other violation of Department publicity regulations.”
Wallace never heard from Roerich again. The “guru letters” remained a secret, for the time being.
In 1940 FDR chose Wallace to run as his VP candidate, and the ticket breezed to victory. When the United States entered World War II, Wallace was one of the first in Washington to learn of the top secret Manhattan Project. It was during these early months of the war, when all appeared bleak in the wake of Nazi advances in Europe, that Wallace formed ideas that would fuel his postwar obsessions. Long before others did, he saw that the Soviet Union, the United States’ most valued military ally against Hitler, would emerge from the war as an unprecedented power in
