America, September, 1940. Chapter Three: Guru Letters and Magic Seeds
Ed Prichard produced the full story of the strange obsessions of Henry Wallace, who would be Vice President. It ranged from Theosophism to Mongolia, and the Republicans had proof of the worst of it.
This Episode: Harry Hopkins had done good work in Manhattan, including falling in love with Tallulah Bankhead. Now his role in Roosevelt’s reëlection campaign was utilitarian and he found a smart kid from Kentucky named Ed Prichard to help him with it. Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s choice for Vice President, had an unusual history that Harry wanted to explore like a political archeologist. Harry put Ed on the job and what he came back with had the potential to lose the election.
Congress was fighting — actually fighting with fists — over Selective Service and it was killing Speaker of the House Will Bankhead, who was Tallulah’s father.
Harry couldn’t get over the idea that he was working in the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Declaration, so, thinking it would inspire the boss, he threw a party to celebrate the signing’s anniversary. Marian Anderson, with a contralto voice that Toscanini said was “heard only once in a hundred years” came and sang the anthem that Lincoln had asked Julia Ward Howe to write for his soldiers to sing at their campfires. Roosevelt wept.
This Chapter: Ed Prichard’s report to Harry Hopkins on Henry Wallace profiled a man whose life was cluttered with even more worrisome things than Harry had feared. No less than George Washington Carver had taught him as a child that God was everywhere, even in blades of grass, which led him from Presbyterianism to Theosophism. That seemed harmless but Wallace’s lifelong impressionable quest for truth left him vulnerable to a guru who had saved letters from Wallace that Prichard said were amusing people at Washington cocktail parties who had snippets that made Wallace sound “like he was smoking something.” Worse, Wallace had sponsored the guru on a journey to Mongolia in search of seeds that grew drought-resistant grass, but diverted into an international dispute. And worst of all, the letters had just been sold to a prominent Republican for $5,000.
Contents: Here are the five chapters of “America, September, 1940” from “Seeking the Hinge” with their dates of publication.
Chapter One: Politics and Romance. Monday, May 5
Chapter Two: Work and Death. Tuesday, May 6
Chapter Three: Guru Letters and Magic Seeds. Wednesday, May 7.
Chapter Four: An Emancipation Celebration. Thursday, May 8.
Chapter Five: A Freudian Mind Meld. Friday, May 9.
Chapter Three: Guru Letters and Magic Seeds
Reading time: eight minutes
Ed Prichard, Felix Frankfurter’s law clerk, was waiting at Harry’s office on his return from the Bankhead burial. Prichard had the analysis of the perils of the past of Henry Wallace that he presented in a three-page report.
He said, “I would like to summarize my work in a brief conversation.”
Harry said, “I asked for a two-page report, the full story no matter how long, and a one-paragraph summary.”
“I showed my work to Justice Frankfurter and told him it didn’t quite conform to your request stylistically, but I believed it did substantively. He asked if it was my best work and I said it was, but I thought my opinions on the matter would be best left to a conversation, and not recorded. He said he agreed with that and was certain your wish was simply to be fully informed. He suggested you might benefit from hearing from me orally, from seeing me as a resource as the issue might subsequently take wing.”
“So I wouldn’t just think of you as a fresh kid from Kentucky.”
“Something like that.”
“Okay. Would you be comfortable with Henry Wallace as the president?”
“I believe he would grow into the job, but I would be happier if Roosevelt didn’t die. At least for a couple of years or, better, four. Best of all, never.”
“Why?”
“Entirely apart from my conviction that President Roosevelt is the most necessary person in the world right now, I see Wallace as a well-intentioned and highly intelligent man who is insufficiently shrewd. He is an impressionable moralist and the implications of each of those words would put him at a disadvantage when faced with men like Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill. And a few in America, but so few in America that I believe the president has chosen well. And I will vote for the ticket with comfort and enthusiasm.”
“What should I know?”
“The political problem you face in the next two months is letters Wallace wrote seven or eight years ago to a now-discredited man named Nicholas Roerich. Half the people in Washington claim to have read them, and many have copies of what might generously be called excerpts. They giggle about them at cocktail parties. But they are utterly worthless as actual evidence since they are transcriptions from transcriptions from transcriptions. They have no legal value and could not meet the standards of a responsible publisher. I have read a half-dozen or so and there is a consistency to them that suggests that the Wallace temperament is short of what would be adequate in a president. There is nothing evil about them, but you might wonder if he was smoking something when he wrote them.”
“Let me see what you’ve seen.” Prichard gave Harry a hand-written note that read, “Dear Guru, I write in great haste. The tension is indeed very great. The Flaming One at the Old House is excellent, but the tigers are going through various tricks and he is softhearted toward them and I fear has made commitments of some sort. Still, I see the Flaming One as possessed of the ever-upward-surging spirit to lead us into the time when the children of men can sing again.”
Harry said, “Is this your handwriting?”
“Yes. A fourth generation transcription written from memory after reading and returning it at one of the cocktail parties.”
“Who are the tigers?”
“Allegedly the Soviets. The story is this was written about the time the president was poised to open diplomatic relations with them. And the Flaming One …”
“Is Roosevelt. And we are sitting in the Old House.”
“Allegedly. Wallace refers to himself as Galahad, sometimes Parsifal. There are no letters from Roerich to Wallace because he has destroyed them. The rumor mills insist that the president himself also corresponded with Roerich, though for now the mills grind on no grist. The problem is that Wallace’s letters, and perhaps some from the president, remained in the hands of a woman named Frances Grant, currently the curator of the Roerich Museum in New York, who may have recently sold them to John Hamilton, the Chairman of the Republican Party, for $5,000. That is your crisis in waiting.”
“Roerich has a museum? Is he dead?”
“Yes to the first and no to the second. He’s a tax fugitive living, best guess, in India.”
“What’s in the museum?”
“Many of his paintings. And … other things.”
“Profile Roerich.”
“Russian born, 66 next month, painter, archeologist, mystic, theosophist, and self-proclaimed guru. Wallace reportedly used ‘Dear Guru’ in the salutations of all his letters. A man of many parts ranging from fraud to genius. Was involved with Stravinsky as set designer and co-producer of ‘The Rites of Spring.’ Friend of Nijinsky. Thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, once by Henry Wallace. But that’s overrated. I could nominate you. Forgive me. Bad joke. I should have said you could nominate me.”
“How did Wallace make his acquaintance?”
“Through his long and persistent quest for spiritual perfection. From his earliest days, the Secretary has searched for higher meaning. As a small boy, he walked alongside George Washington Carver who chatted with him about the presence of God in all things, even to the blades of grass.”
“How did that happen?”
“Carver was a botanical instructor at Iowa State University. It’s in the city where the Wallaces lived. Ames.”
“I’m from Iowa.”
“I know.”
Harry smiled at that, but kept it small. Prichard said, “Carver couldn’t live on campus because he was colored so the Wallace family took him in. Little Henry and Mr. Carver took nature walks. Over time, Henry wandered away from the family’s Presbyterianism and became an untethered seeker of wisdom and truth. That’s when he found Theosophy. It’s not a religion. It has no churches. Just meeting rooms. They see God in everything. Who can quarrel with that? Thomas Edison was a Theosophist. Yeats also, Mondrian, even Abner Doubleday. Maybe George Washington Carver. Henry settled as an Episcopalian about the end of the last decade, about the same time he became disenchanted with his Republican heritage. He heard of Roerich and opened a relationship. One thing led to another.”
“And Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture and sent Roerich off in search of Shangri-La at the taxpayers’ expense?”
“No. He sent him to Mongolia in search of some kind of magic seeds.”
“Like Jack and the Beanstalk?”
“Sort of. But there is evidence of trees and other flora, even grass, in the Gobi Desert that have extraordinary survival powers, retaining water like desert camels. Well, not like desert camels, but you get the point. Wallace is a great agronomist, made a fortune with his development of hybrid corn and the business that flowed from it. He really wanted the magic seeds for what they might bring to the Midwestern farm zones that were dying from drought. Roerich persuaded Wallace that his skill set included agronomy and that he was the one to lead the expedition. Roosevelt agreed. That’s not clear. I believe Roosevelt agreed with the idea of the expedition, but there is no evidence that he endorsed Roerich as its leader. Roerich went off half-cocked over there and caused a lot of trouble with the Chinese and the Russians. And forgot about the seeds. Wallace’s undersecretary had insisted on a team of actual experts to go along, and they eventually came home with a lot of seeds, but without Roerich, who remained in Asia after he got a big bill from the IRS for back taxes. There is no evidence that Roerich went in search of Shangri-La, but it would have been better if he had and it makes a good story at cocktail parties. The expedition ended Wallace’s affection for Roerich.”
“What happened to the seeds?”
“They’re in … seed research. The department says the results to date are ‘promising’.”
“How did the IRS complaint emerge?”
“Wallace caused it. Snitched him off, so to speak. Vengeance perhaps.”
Harry said, “Good.”
Prichard said, “Good?”
“Good work, young Mr. Prichard.”
“Thank you. I should mention that Wallace wrote a letter to Roerich’s wife disavowing the man and saying he would have nothing more to do with him. A copy is in the file.”
“Even better. What are your plans for your career?”
“I plan to pursue law and public service. My ambition is to become President of the United States. But not Vice President.”
“Well, good for you. I am sufficiently impressed, and more than a little needy, to ask you to undertake another task for me. One that must be done quickly and equally as well, if not as thoroughly, as this one.”
He asked him to investigate the circumstances of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation so he didn’t end up conducting an anniversary celebration of a hoax.