 |
| Wallace and Roerich |
Dear Guru, I have been thinking of you holding the casket – the sacred most precious casket. 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.”
It’s part of a letter that continues in this weird vain and is signed by “Galahad.”
In 1948, “Galahad” was a candidate for president of the United States, giving his first press conference here in Philadelphia at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. The candidate was Henry Wallace, former vice president and former secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
According to one author that press conference left Wallace’s “candidacy a tattered ruin.”
Westbrook Pegler, a sardonic syndicated columnist had obtained about 20 of these strange, coded “Guru letters” that Wallace had written in the 1930s to Russian artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich.
On the one hand, Wallace was a highly educated agronomist and economist whose many accomplishments included developing the first commercial hybrid corn. But Wallace was also a religious seeker. He swallowed whole the occult mysticism of Tibet, India and China as taught by Roerich.
So, as Wallace faced the reporters the night before his new Progressive Party would nominate him for president, there were two big questions:
Was Wallace a Communist and what on earth did the “Guru letters” mean?
Wallace refused to denounce the support of the American Communist Party and no matter how many times reporters asked and badgered him about the Guru letters, he side-stepped the issue.
Finally, when the esteemed writer H.L Mencken asked about the mysterious letters, Wallace said, “I’ll handle this in my own way at my own time.”
In his column the next day, Pegler repeatedly referred to Wallace as “Old Bubblehead” and “Mortimer Snerd.” He called the letters “imbecilic” and “goofy.” The Inquirer’s front page headline read “Wallace Dodges Ties to Communists, But Accepts Red Support.”
Needless to say, Wallace did not win a single electoral vote in the presidential race and less than three percent of the popular vote. Philly had scored the trifecta in 1948 with the Democrats, GOP and
Progressives all holding their convention here. All avoided Philly for the next 50 years. We will explain in a future post.
One last word about the Guru Letters. They had first emerged in 1940 after it was too late for FDR to dump Wallace. Roosevelt handled the situation by letting the Republican know that if they released the letters, he would expose the extra-marital affairs of Republican candidate Wendell Willkie.
So, the Guru letters disappeared for four years and Willkie’s alleged love affair remained secret.