I had the great good fortune to spend most of my recent honeymoon in the beautiful city of Prague, capital of Czechia (also known as the Czech Republic, and formerly half of Czechoslovakia, of which Prague was also the capital). It was my first visit to Prague, and on just about every cobblestoned street and around most every curve of the Vltava River I found something both unexpected and lovely. But without question the most unexpected discovery was a towering statue located in a park outside of the city’s 150-year-old main train station, Praha hlavní nádraží: a monument to none other than American President Woodrow Wilson.
That statue, which was originally erected in 1928, torn down by the Nazis during their occupation of the city, and restored in 2011, reflects histories linked to not just Wilson but also multiple presidents of both the United States and Czechia. Those connections reveal a great deal about Czech history, but they also show the frustrating yet inspiring meaning of American democratic ideals around the world.
The first president who connects these histories also happens to be the first president of Czechoslovakia, the professor and radical activist Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937). When Masaryk was born in the Southern Czech region of Moravia, it was part of the Austrian Empire; by the time he became a Professor of Philosophy at Prague’s historic Charles-Ferdinand University and then a government deputy, the region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But Masaryk had long advocated for Czech and Slovak independence, and the outbreak of the Great War (World War I) allowed him to travel Europe gaining support for that cause, not only politically but also militarily through his founding of the Czechoslovak Legion who fought against the empire and its allies.
It was the 1918 culmination of those advocacy efforts that brought Masaryk into contact and then friendship with Woodrow Wilson. Masaryk had been married to an American citizen, Charlotte Garrigue, since 1878 and so had visited the United States on a few occasions prior to 1918. But those had been more personal or academic visits, while in 1918 Masaryk arrived as a celebrated wartime activist and freedom fighter. More than 150,000 cheered him on at a welcome parade in Chicago on May 5, and in early October the city hosted President Wilson and countless other significant figures for a formal conference with Masaryk on the question of Czechoslovak independence.