A philosophy professor talked a new country into existence from exile
When the First World War began, Tomáš Masaryk was a Prague philosophy professor who had long wanted Austria-Hungary reformed, not broken up. By 1918 he had lobbied across Europe, helped build an army of Czech and Slovak volunteers, won over Woodrow Wilson's government, and become the first president of Czechoslovakia.
Masaryk was born on 7 March 1850 in Hodonín, Moravia, to a poor family: his Slovak father was a coachman on an imperial estate and his Moravian mother a cook there. He studied in Vienna under the philosopher Franz Brentano, writing a doctorate on Plato and later a study of suicide as a social phenomenon of modern civilisation. In Leipzig he met Charlotte Garrigue, whose surname he added to his own and whose views drew him toward feminism.
As a professor at the Czech university in Prague from 1882, he made enemies by insisting on evidence. He challenged two celebrated medieval Czech manuscripts as fakes that fed a false nationalism, and he opposed the antisemitic blood libel during the 1899 Hilsner trial. He believed social conflict sprang from ignorance and that careful, scientific study could find the remedies, so he cast himself as the public's teacher.
He served in the Austrian parliament from 1891 to 1893 and again from 1907 to 1914, still arguing for a federal empire. The war changed his mind. Leaving in December 1914 with his daughter Olga, he worked through Western Europe, Russia, the United States and Japan, lecturing in London on the problem of small nations and opening a Piccadilly office plastered with maps and slogans. His intelligence contacts helped the Allies, and he pushed to turn a small Czech and Slovak unit in Russia into the Czechoslovak Legion, which reached about 40,000 troops by 1918.
In 1918 he went to Washington alongside two younger allies he had mentored, Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik, to win over President Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, producing the declaration of Czechoslovak independence. Elected president that November and re-elected three times, he oversaw a stable democracy until he stepped down in 1935, citing age. He died in 1937, aged 87, and is remembered as the nation's founding father.
Source: Tomáš Masaryk
