Abstract

Thomas Garrigue Masaryk

The article focuses on Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia Republic. He was president of a country which attracts relatively little attention, however, in this article Masaryk's teachings and his example have been recalled as they have something of importance for the future. Masaryk was born of a peasant family and was obliged from the very start to make his own way in surroundings much less favorable than he would have encountered in the United States of that day. The first step towards the presidency consisted in learning to understand the problems faced by his nation inside the "Dual Monarchy." The second was to educate the Czechs through his work as a teacher, writer, and journalist. In practice, of course, he could accomplish nothing against an aristocratic German oligarchy and a corrupt bureaucracy, but his efforts in the years before the First World War gained him a European reputation.