In 1920 he emigrated to the United States, where he fashioned a reputation as a painter, seer, guru, and peacenik, especially among the well-to-do, who provided him funds and even built him museums, one of which still stands in New York City. In 1930 he befriended Henry Wallace (Wallace, Henry A.), who, after becoming secretary of agriculture in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, sent him on a botanical expedition to the Gobi desert to determine whether conditions there had answers for America's Dust Bowl. Ignoring his mission for the most part, Roerich waded into Asian politics, roaming with a Cossack bodyguard and vainly urging Buddhist masses to revolution. Wallace broke with Roerich over these events but not before an exchange of letters demonstrated both men's antic views. (In one letter this oracular view of Manchuria was expressed in fanciful code: “The Monkeys are seeking friendship with the Rulers so as to divide the land of the Masters between them. The Wandering One thinks this, and is very suspicious of Monkeys.”) These so-called “guru letters” came into the possession of a Pittsburgh newspaper but, through the efforts of the Roosevelt administration in 1940, were suppressed. The first excerpts were not published until 1948.