Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk founded Czechoslovakia and served as its president for seventeen years, becoming the model of the philosopher-statesman between the wars. Born in Hodonín in Moravia in 1850 to a Slovak coachman and a Moravian cook, he was apprenticed as a blacksmith before a teacher intervened to get him educated. He studied philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, where he met Charlotte Garrigue, an American whose surname he took as his own on marriage. He became a professor in Prague and made his reputation by unpopular truth-telling. He argued in the 1880s that the Dvůr Králové manuscripts, treasured as evidence of an ancient Czech literature, were forgeries — and was right, at severe cost to his standing. In 1899 he intervened in the Hilsner affair, defending a Jewish man convicted of ritual murder, and was denounced as a traitor to his nation. He sat in the Austrian parliament, and in December 1914, at sixty-four, went into exile to work for the destruction of Austria-Hungary. With Edvard Beneš and Milan Štefánik he built the Czechoslovak National Council, lobbied Allied governments, and organised the Czechoslovak Legions from prisoners of war — some 60,000 men who ended up fighting across Siberia along the Trans-Siberian Railway, an episode that gave the cause enormous publicity. He negotiated the Pittsburgh Agreement with Slovak Americans in 1918, and declared independence from Washington that October. As president from 1918 he built the only democracy in central Europe to survive the interwar period intact, with land reform and minority protections, though Sudeten German and Slovak grievances persisted. He resigned in 1935 and died in 1937.
- Lived: 1850 CE – 1937 CE
- Nationality: Czech
- Roles: president, statesman, philosopher
