PARIS 1919 (42 page)

Masaryk crisscrossed the country—Chicago, Washington, Boston, Cleveland, wherever there were Czech and Slovak immigrants. In New York he lectured the experts of the Inquiry on self-determination in eastern Europe. He talked to representatives from Austria-Hungary's other nationalities about working together in freedom and friendship. At a huge meeting in Carnegie Hall, he and Paderewski spoke of their profound admiration for each other and their common struggle against oppression. Three weeks before the war ended, the Mid-European Democratic Union, with Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, South Slavs, Rumanians, Italians and even, improbably, Armenians and Zionists staged a four-day meeting in Philadelphia. Masaryk crafted a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations. As the Liberty Bell rang, he was the first to sign it, dipping his pen in the inkwell used for the American Declaration of Independence.
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In Pittsburgh, Masaryk signed another agreement, this one with Czech and Slovak organizations, promising that, within the new democratic state, Slovaks would have considerable autonomy, with their own courts, a parliament and their own language. Although about a third of the world's Slovaks lived in the United States, they were not yet strongly nationalistic. Murmurs from their compatriots in Central Europe that not all Slovaks wanted union had not yet made their way across the Atlantic. Later on, when things started to go wrong between Czechs and Slovaks, Masaryk downplayed the agreement. “It was concluded in order to appease a small Slovak faction which was dreaming of God knows what sort of independence for Slovakia.”
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The Pittsburgh Convention was useful in reassuring the Americans that self-determination would carry Slovakia into Czechoslovakia. And American support would be, as Masaryk knew, vital. Through Charles Crane, a well-traveled, inquisitive tycoon whose fortune came from making sinks and toilets, Masaryk met Lansing, House and finally, on June 18, Wilson. The meeting with the president did not go well. The two former professors lectured each other. More important, Masaryk discovered that Wilson was more interested in using the Czech Legion in Siberia than in supporting Czechoslovak independence. The Americans were not yet ready to admit publicly that Austria-Hungary was finished.
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By the autumn, it clearly was. Austrian forces had been smashed on the battlefields; inside the empire, the inexperienced young emperor watched impotently as Poles, South Slavs, Czechs, Germans talked of independence. In Prague, demonstrators cheered for Wilson and Masaryk. In Wilson's words, Austria-Hungary was “an old building whose sides had been held together by props.” The time had come to take away those props. On September 3 the United States recognized the Czechoslovak National Council as a de facto belligerent government. Like the earlier British recognition, the statement did not specify the territory the new country would occupy.
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From Paris, Bene
decided to create facts on the ground. “A
fait accompli,
” he wrote to his colleagues, “carried through without noise or struggle and the domination of the situation are now decisive.” On October 28, in Prague, Czech politicians gently but firmly took power from the demoralized Austrian administration. Bene
urged the Allies to evacuate the German and Hungarian forces from the Czech lands and Slovakia and to bring in Allied forces. It was essential as well, he told the French, to occupy Teschen, on the border with Poland, and Bratislava (German Press-burg) in Hungary. Since the Allies had few troops to spare, the occupation was largely done by Czech forces acting under Allied command.
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The delay in starting the Peace Conference helped the Czechs considerably. By January 1919, Masaryk was back in Prague, installed as Czechoslovakia's first president and living in the palace that had once housed Bohemia's kings. In spite of complaints from the inhabitants, Czech troops had moved into the German-speaking borderlands, where Bohemia met Austria in the south and Germany in the north. In Slovakia the French military authorities had ordered the Hungarian government to withdraw its troops behind a line that, conveniently, coincided with the border the Czechs wanted.

Czechoslovakia's borders had been largely set by the time the peacemakers turned their attention to the new country. Above all, Bene
wanted recognition from the Peace Conference, but he also wanted to push the borders out in places. When he had his hearing at the Supreme Council on February 5, 1919, he laid claim to several morsels of Poland, as well as a slice of Hungary stretching along the Danube, and, where the great river bends south, pointing on toward the Carpathian mountains. He also asked for pieces of German and Austrian territory north and south of the old Bohemian and Moravian frontiers to give Czechoslovakia a smoother and more defensible border. These, Bene
claimed in private conversations, were not his demands; he was being pushed, he regretted, by nationalists such as his colleague Kramář.
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At Czechoslovakia's tail in the east, Bene
asked for the largely Ukrainian-speaking territory on the south side of the Carpathians on the grounds that the locals, largely Ruthenians, were very like the Slovaks. It would be unkind, he felt, to leave them under Hungarian rule when Czechoslovakia was prepared to take them under its wing. (Conveniently, Ruthenian immigrants in the United States had voted for joining Czechoslovakia.) Adding in that piece of territory would also give Czechoslovakia a border with Rumania, a friendly state.
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He had a couple of further requests, suggestions really. There were some Slavs living in the southern part of Germany, just east of Dresden, who had begged Czechoslovakia to protect them. This was essentially a moral question and he left it to the Peace Conference. Then there was Czechoslovakia's need for friends, surrounded as it was on three sides by Germans and Hungarians. Perhaps there could be a corridor of land running southward between Austria and Hungary to link his country with Yugoslavia. “Very audacious and indefensible,” was Lloyd George's view. The corridor, which never materialized, reflected Masaryk's old dreams of a Slav federation. The Poles, Yugoslavs and Czechoslovaks, Bene
assured the French, were all aware of how much they had in common. Although a dispute over the territory of Teschen was already removing Poland from that happy equation, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were to remain on friendly terms.
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The Czechs had many arguments to back their claims: their glorious past, their deep love of freedom, their sober, industrious virtues. They stood against Bolshevism when the lesser peoples around them were succumbing. They were at the same time the most advanced part of the Slavs and a bastion of Western civilization. His people, claimed Bene
, had always felt a special mission to defend democracy against the German menace. “Hence the fanatical devotion of the Czechs which had been noticed by all in this war.” The Czech demands were modest and reasonable. “The Nation,” said Bene
, “after 300 years of servitude and vicissitudes which had almost led to its extermination, felt that it must be prudent, reasonable and just to its neighbours; and that it must avoid provoking jealousy and renewed struggles which might again plunge it into similar danger.” His government, he insisted, “wished to do all in their power to assist a just and durable peace.” Lloyd George, almost alone, was unimpressed. “He larded his speech throughout with phrases that reeked with professions of sympathy for the exalted ideals proclaimed by the Allies in their crusade for international right.” When Kramář, as second Czech delegate, asked to add his views, Clemenceau, despite his sympathy for Czechoslovakia, cut him short: “Oh, we'll appoint a special commission and you can talk to them for a couple of hours. Now we had better have a cup of tea.”
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