Printed in the Fall 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Orvetti, Peter, "The Theosophist Who Was Nearly President: The “Heart Trust” of Henry A. Wallace" Quest 112:4, pg 34-36
By Peter Orvetti
On July 20, 1944, the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Florida Senator Claude Pepper pushed through the sweltering crowd in an attempt to reach the podium. The event scripted by party leaders—the hostile replacement of the incumbent vice president on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ticket with a more malleable senator from Missouri—was going off the rails. Progressive delegates chanted the name of the vice president, and Senator Pepper wanted to force a vote to save him while the crowd was hot. Seeing Pepper approach, and with gesticulating party insiders cajoling him to act, the convention chair brought down the gavel, ending the proceedings for the night.
The next night, with passions cooled and deals cut, Harry Truman was nominated as FDR’s running mate. Less than nine months later, Truman—not Henry Agard Wallace, mystic, chela, and erstwhile Theosophist—would become president of the United States.
History turns on such moments. If Pepper had made it to the stage, the closing days of World War II and the course of the fragile peace that followed would have looked quite different. Historians have mused that a President Wallace would have been loath to use the atomic bomb against Japan and would have pursued a more conciliatory (or, as some have argued, more naive) policy toward the Soviet Union.
FDR was not prone to sentimentality. He had anointed Wallace, then agriculture secretary, as his vice-presidential pick in 1940 to shore up support among farmers and liberals. By 1944, Roosevelt needed to bolster a different coalition. Roosevelt also knew that his health was failing and that the candidate he selected would probably become president sometime during the next four years. Wallace had to go.
But Roosevelt liked Wallace personally, in part because of Wallace’s interest in esoteric matters. Roosevelt had little personal interest in the worlds beyond this one, but his beloved mother had been interested in Asian mysticism, and FDR liked to listen to Wallace speak on the subject. These friendly conversations stand in sharp contrast to how FDR’s advisors and other Wallace opponents would use Wallace’s occult interests as a weapon against him in the years ahead.
Henry Wallace (1888‒1965) was an unlikely politician. The vice presidency was the first and only office to which he was elected, and a decade before he rose to that office, few in Washington knew who he was. Wallace was an Iowa crop scientist and livestock breeder; seed and poultry companies he founded still thrive today. He was also the editor of an agriculture journal founded by his grandfather: Wallace’s Farmer, which is still being published under the title Wallaces Farmer. Wallace was blunt, long-winded, and had a tendency toward pomposity; he was not the sort who seemed likely to enter public life.
The Wallaces were Presbyterians, but young Henry, an insatiable reader, developed an interest in comparative religion, with a particular interest in traditions rooted in the land. His discovery of the works of the Theosophist Irish poet and essayist George William Russell, who published under the pseudonym Æ, resulted in a correspondence between the two, and in 1919, Wallace attended his first meeting of the Theosophical Society’s Des Moines branch. Wallace joined the TS several years later and even helped to organize a local branch of C.W. Leadbeater’s Liberal Catholic Church.
In 1927, Dmitry Nikolaevich Borodin, a Russian agronomist who had been working on seed exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, came to Des Moines to deliver a speech. There he met the young editor of Wallace’s Farmer, and when he learned of Wallace’s interest in spirituality, he urged him to familiarize himself with the mystical Russian artist Nicholas Roerich.
A few months later, while on a business trip to New York, Wallace visited the Roerich Museum, an imposing twenty-four-story art deco skyscraper and the first museum in the U.S. dedicated solely to a single artist. When he stepped through the door, Wallace froze and stood in silence for long enough for the receptionist to seek help. The museum’s vice president, Roerich acolyte Frances Grant, asked the visitor if he was feeling ill. Wallace assured her that he was not; rather, he said he was experiencing “vibrations” from a Tibetan prayer mat near the entrance.
Roerich had a knack for nurturing relationships with powerful people, but the obscure farm journalist was at the time beneath his attention. Wallace met Roerich at the museum in 1929, but it was a cursory encounter. Wallace and Grant corresponded regularly, but the Russian sage paid Wallace little heed. That would change in the new decade.
The Wallaces had been Republicans for generations, but the calamity of the Great Depression led Wallace to break with tradition and endorse Roosevelt in his magazine in 1932. FDR swept the traditionally Republican Midwest in his landslide victory that November, and Wallace was rewarded with Cabinet consideration. The two men had met just once before the election, and it had not gone well, so Wallace considered the new president-elect’s interest to be a matter of courtesy. Instead, Roosevelt, seeking radical and innovative solutions to the crisis, made Wallace his secretary of agriculture—a position much more prominent then than it is today.
Secretary Wallace went from obscurity to national prominence nearly overnight, becoming a favorite of progressives and New Dealers for his radical, try-anything approach to righting the nation’s farm policies. He also saw his post as a means to spread the Ancient Wisdom to a larger audience. He attended the 1934 annual convention of the TSA, and that same year he persuaded FDR to add the Great Seal of the United States, with its Eye of Providence hovering above an unfinished pyramid, to a redesign of the dollar bill, where it remains to this day.
Roerich had brought the image—also known as the “All-Seeing Eye”—to Wallace’s attention. But this was not the only way in which Roerich would influence Wallace’s official actions, to the secretary’s ultimate regret.
Roerich and his wife, Helena, had developed a plan to carve a spiritual kingdom out of East Asia, based on the principles of their Agni Yoga system, with its capital in the mystical city of Shambala and possibly with Roerich himself as king. (Roerich began insisting that he was the reincarnation of Tibet’s greatest leader, the seventeenth-century Fifth Dalai Lama, though whether he truly believed this or used the claim as a political tool remains up for debate.) Roerich easily convinced Wallace to place him and his son on a Department of Agriculture expedition to collect drought-resistant grasses in the Gobi Desert, and then got Wallace to put him in charge of the expedition, outranking experienced researchers and scientists, over the objections of Wallace’s top advisors.
The expedition was a disaster, and Wallace broke with Roerich for good, even having the Russian mystic audited by the Internal Revenue Service. In 1935, Wallace resigned from the Theosophical Society, but this was a result of his painful education in political realities as a result of the Roerich affair and not because he had terminated his esoteric quest. He was still, as he had told a friend years before, “a searcher for methods of bringing the Inner Light to outward manifestation.” He had simply realized that as a public figure—and one with nascent presidential ambitions—he had to keep it to himself.
In the five years following the Roerich expedition, the public scandal died down, eclipsed by Wallace’s prominent and successful role in forging agriculture policy. By 1940, Roosevelt felt it safe to name Wallace as his running mate as he sought an unprecedented third term. Frances Grant, ever loyal to Roerich and furious with Wallace over his spurning of her teacher, reached out to anti-Roosevelt operatives with a bombshell: there were letters.
In the period of their acquaintance, and while he was already serving in the Cabinet, Wallace had penned multiple letters to Roerich, sometimes starting with the greeting “Dear Guru.” In these missives, Wallace referred to himself as “Galahad” and to FDR as “the Flaming One.” In one representative segment, Wallace wrote, “Long have I been aware of the occasional fragrance from that other world which is the real world. But now I must live in the outer world and at the same time make over my mind and body to serve as fit instruments for the Lord of Justice.” In another, he recounted a dream in which he was talking with Roosevelt and “was amazed to see that instead of eyes there was swirling black smoke. And out of the mouth came swirling black smoke.”
One Democratic donor who opposed Wallace’s vice-presidential nomination said of him, “He was so much the prophet, an unworldly man of mysterious leanings and ideas, that it was obvious to all who knew him that he would only make the country a mighty strange president.” But Roosevelt pushed him through anyway, daring the Republicans to use the so-called “Guru Letters” against him.
Republicans did acquire the letters, but their presidential nominee, industrialist Wendell Willkie, refused to use them. In part, this was because Willkie feared the Democrats would retaliate by spreading unsubstantiated stories of an extramarital affair. But also Willkie—an uncommonly idealistic politician who would later become a leading advocate for a democratic world government—just thought it would be wrong to do so.
When Wallace was dumped from the ticket four years later, after an uneventful term as vice president, the Guru Letters were barely mentioned. They only came to light in 1948, when Wallace ran a third-party candidacy against the incumbent Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey on a platform of peace and accommodation with the Soviet Union. Wallace never stood a chance, but any hopes of a respectable showing were lost after right-wing syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler splashed excerpts across the nation’s newspapers. Wallace limped to a fourth-place finish with just over 2 percent of the national popular vote, trailing even the segregationist Strom Thurmond.
Wallace lived on for nearly two decades after that defeat, gradually withdrawing from the public sphere and returning to his first love, crop science. Whatever metaphysical pursuits he engaged in until he died in 1965 he kept to himself. But Wallace seemed to never abandon the view he espoused in an essay titled “Statesmanship and Religion,” published at the height of his prominence in the 1930s:
We need a “heart trust”—a trust in the innate goodness of the human heart when it has not been warped by the mammon worship, the false science, and the false economics of the nineteenth century . . . I cannot but feel that the destiny of the world is toward far greater unity than that which we now enjoy, and that in order to attain such unity it will be necessary for the members of the different races, classes, and creeds to open their hearts and minds to the unfolding reality of the immediate future in a way which they have never done before.
Sources
Culver, J.C., and J. Hyde. American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. New York: Norton, 2001.
Kleinman, M.L. “Searching for the ‘Inner Light’: The Development of Henry A. Wallace’s Experimental Spiritualism.” The Annals of Iowa 53, no. 3 (1994), 195–218.
McCannon, J. Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Reviewed in Quest, spring 2024.
Steil, B. The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2024.
Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C., who writes frequently for Quest.