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against his straightforward Midwest persona, Wallace displayed a weakness for the kinds of secrecy and spiritual theatrics found within the European occult—traits that Roerich reveled in. The pale Russian often scowled before cameras in Oriental robes and a Fu Manchu–style beard, resembling the Hollywood image of a mystic. (In fact, Roerich’s tales of his faraway Asian travels are often rumored to have influenced the popular novel and Frank Capra film Lost Horizon, which depicted a mythical land of Shangri-La tucked deep in the Himalayas.) In the early 1930s, Roerich bestowed on his friend Wallace an initiate name, “Galahad”—after the Arthurian knight—and Wallace then used his nom de mystique to sign dramatic, imagery-laden letters to Roerich.

“Dear Guru,” began one of the most oft-quoted and enigmatic, in 1933, “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.’ ” Imbued with the insider jargon of the Roerich circle, Wallace’s letters could sound like scenarios from the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Wallace’s love for mythical terms and code words spilled over into White House correspondence to FDR. This 1935 note from Wallace to Roosevelt probably ranks as one of the oddest interoffice memos in White House history:

I feel for a short time yet that we must deal with the “strong ones,” the “turbulent ones,” the “fervent ones,” and perhaps even with a temporary resurgence, with the “flameless ones,” who with the last dying gasp will strive to reanimate their dying giant “Capitalism.” Mr. President, you can be the “flaming one,” the one with an ever-upsurging spirit to lead into the time when the children of men can sing again.

On one such occasion, FDR was reported to remark, “By God! What’s the matter with Wallace?” An undersecretary joked, “I don’t dare let a Theosophist in to see Henry—he’d give him a job right away.” Wallace cooled suspicions by breaking with Roerich in the fall of 1935, just months after the signing of the Roerich Pact. The mystic and his son had turned a White House–funded agricultural expedition to Mongolia into an international charade in which Roerich proved more interested in political skulduggery than gathering strains of drought-resistant grass. For inscrutable reasons of his own, Roerich managed to pick up an armed band of White Russian Cossacks on the Mongolian frontier, whom he led on a traverse of Russo–Asian borderlands, alarming Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese authorities. The ill-defined detour got Roerich branded as everything from a White Russian spy to a general pest meddling in Eurasian hot spots. White House colleagues were relieved when Wallace finally ordered the mission to an end and cut all ties with Roerich.

The Eye and the Pyramid

The last thing Wallace wanted was for his spiritual interests to cast a shadow over his cabinet duties. But slowly that shadow began to fall, even while his political influence continued to rise.

In his own oral histories of the White House years, Wallace proudly took credit for calling to Roosevelt’s attention the little-known image of the eye and pyramid on the back of the Great Seal of the United States and suggesting that it be used on currency. From America’s founding up through the New Deal era, the Great Seal had been used mostly for treaties and other official government business and was an unfamiliar ceremonial insignia when it first caught Wallace’s attention in 1934. He considered its Latin maxim, Novus Ordo Seclorum—New Order of the Ages—as translatable to New Deal of the Ages. At the signing of the Roerich Pact, Wallace spoke of the need for a “spiritual New Deal,” one that “places that which is fine in humanity above that which is low and sordid and mean and hateful and grabbing.” Roosevelt, himself a Freemason, was not uncomfortable with portentous symbols and grand imagery. Wallace recalled that when he raised the issue