Tomáš Masaryk

Tomáš Masaryk (born March 7, 1850, near Göding, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Hodonín, Czech Republic]—died Sept. 14, 1937, Lány, Czech.) was the chief founder and first president (1918–35) of Czechoslovakia.

Early life

Masaryk’s father was a Slovak coachman; his mother, a maid, came from a Germanized Moravian family. Though he was trained to be a teacher, he briefly became a locksmith’s apprentice but then entered the German Hochschule in Brno in 1865. Continuing his studies at the University of Vienna, he obtained his doctorate in 1876. He studied for a year in Leipzig, where he met an American student of music, Charlotte Garrigue, whom he married in 1878. He was appointed lecturer in philosophy in Vienna in 1879, and he became professor of philosophy in the Czech university of Prague in 1882.

Masaryk was a Neo-Kantian, but he was also strongly influenced by the English puritan ethics and the austere teaching of the Hussites. At the same time, he showed a critical interest in the self-contradictions of capitalism—e.g., in his first major work, a study of suicide as a mass phenomenon of modern civilization.

Masaryk’s early works on the Czech Reformation and the Czech revival of the early 19th century were intended to remind the Czechs of the “religious meaning” of their heritage. His treatise on the work of the Czech historian František Palacký, who favoured equal rights for Slavs within the Austrian state, was a profound analysis of Austrian-Czech tensions. Masaryk founded two periodicals, in one of which he proved after a bitter debate that two ostensibly early medieval Czech poems, regarded as Slavic counterparts of the German Nibelungenlied, were in fact patriotic forgeries by an early 19th-century Czech poet.

In 1889 Masaryk entered upon his political career after transforming a journal into a political review. In the early 1890s he began to turn his attention to the Slovaks in northern Hungary. By criticizing both the feudal nature of Hungarian sovereignty and the antiquated Pan-Slav tendencies of the Slovak politicians, he became the idol of the young Slovak progressives who played a decisive role in the Czech-Slovak union in 1918–19. After unmasking the forged medieval Czech poems, he demonstrated his willingness to risk unpopularity in pursuit of moral righteousness once again when he succeeded in 1899 in proving the innocence of Jews accused in a ritual-murder case. Although deeply involved in political controversies, Masaryk published two monumental works before 1914. In his work on Marxism (1898), he discussed the immanent contradictions of both capitalism and socialism. In Russia and Europe (1913) he provided a critical survey of the Russian religious, intellectual, and social crises—the contradictions and confusions of the “Byzantine” retardation of Russian society by the Orthodox church and reactionary ideas.

As a politician Masaryk was at first an adherent of the federative Austro-Slavism envisioned in 1848. But as a democrat he gradually became estranged from the loyal, conservative, and Roman Catholic concept of the Old Czech Party and accepted the invitation of the liberal, bourgeois Young Czech Party. In 1891 he was elected to the Austrian Reichsrat, but, after disagreeing with the Young Czechs’ emotional nationalism, he resigned his seat in 1893. In March 1900 he founded his own Realist Party, and, after his reelection in a more democratic Reichsrat, he became an outstanding figure of the left Slav opposition there. In both the Reichsrat and the standing committee of the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, he attacked Austria-Hungary’s alliance with Germany and its imperialistic politics in the Balkans. He defended the rights of the Serbs and Croats—especially at the time of the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria.

Fight for Czech and Slovak independence

In early 1915, after the outbreak of World War I, Masaryk made his way to western Europe, where he was recognized as the representative of the underground Czech liberation movement and conducted a vigorous campaign against Austria-Hungary and Germany. His British and French friends helped him to establish contact with the Allied leaders, to whom he delineated the Czech aims: restitution of Bohemia’s independence on a democratic basis; establishment of Czech-Slovak unity; dismemberment of Austria-Hungary according to ethnic principles; and establishment of new states between Germany and Russia as a cordon sanitaire (“sanitary line,” or line drawn around an infected spot) against German imperialism.

After the overthrow of the autocratic tsarist regime in 1917, Masaryk transferred his activities to Russia in order to organize the Czechoslovak Legion, formed by Czechoslovak war prisoners, and to develop contacts with the new government. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he set out for the United States, where he was welcomed by Czech and Slovak groups and where he negotiated the terms of Czechoslovak independence with President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The Lansing Declaration of May 1918 expressed the sympathy of the U.S. government with the Czechoslovak freedom movement, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation became one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for the post-World War I peace settlement. Masaryk also concluded the so-called Pittsburgh Convention with the Slovak associations in the United States, which promised the Slovaks a large measure of home rule; the interpretation of this declaration led to controversies between the Slovak opposition and the Czechoslovak government during the life of the first Czech republic.

On June 3, 1918, Czechoslovakia was recognized as an Allied power, and its frontiers were demarcated according to Masaryk’s outline. As Masaryk had promised, the new multinational state respected the minority rights of its large German and Hungarian ethnic groups. On Nov. 14, 1918, he was elected president of Czechoslovakia, and he was reelected in 1920, 1927, and 1934. As a true “liberator” and “father of his country,” he was constantly occupied in settling the crises resulting from the conflicts between the Czech and the Slovak parties, as well as from Slovakia’s minority status. A philosopher and democrat, Masaryk was among the first to voice his anxiety over central Europe’s fate after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. He resigned his post in December 1935 and died nearly two years later.