Notes:

Charlotte Masaryk


Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk (November 20, 1850-May 13, 1923), first First Lady of Czechoslovakia, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was Rudolph Garrigue, a businessman of Huguenot background whose parents and sister were Unitarian. Her mother was Charlotte Lydia Whiting, whose interest in transcendentalism led her to write to Ralph Waldo Emerson and be in contact with Brook Farm . In trying times Masaryk's Unitarian faith and character had a singular influence on her adopted country in central Europe.
Charlotte and two of her ten siblings were christened at their home by Frederick A. Farley, minister of Brooklyn's First Unitarian Church. Later Charlotte and her family moved to the Bronx. Hoping to be a concert pianist, Masaryk at seventeen went to Leipzig, Germany, where prolonged practice permanently damaged her hand. Her promising career ended after three years' study.
Back in the Bronx she took up mathematics and taught piano and corresponded with the daughter of the family she had stayed with in Leipzig, whose letters were filled with descriptions of Thomas Masaryk, then boarding with them. In 1876 Charlotte returned to Leipzig to meet the man she would marry and who would become the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia. That same year he received his doctorate from the University of Vienna and soon they were studying and discussing books together. He admired her desire for precise knowledge and her deep religious feeling and declared her magnificent intellect better than his own. When she left to visit other European friends before returning to the United States, he proposed to her in a letter. On March 15, 1878 they were married, first in a civil ceremony at New York's City Hall and then in a Unitarian ceremony in the double parlor of her parents' large Bronx home.
Returning to Europe, the couple lived in Vienna where Thomas Masaryk taught at the university until 1881, when he was engaged to teach philosophy in that half of Prague's Charles University in which the Czech language would be used. Charlotte Masaryk and their children, who eventually numbered five (four survived infancy), joined him in Prague, where he was prominent in the movement to restore the Czech language. Considering her husband's work for Czech nationalism the most important part of their lives, Masaryk refused to entertain his desire to move to the United States both in 1886 and again in 1899 when he was the most hated man in Bohemia. His refusal to accept forgeries of ancient manuscripts to bolster Czech identity triggered the first period of hostility. The second followed his stand against anti-Semitism and crude superstition when Leopold Hilsner, a poor Jew was accused of committing a ritual murder. Knowing that her presence would shield her unpopular husband from possibly lethal assault, Masaryk accompanied him to his lectures. She fearlessly addressed angry anti-Semitic students who threatened her family and who demonstrated outside her home.
Charlotte Masaryk learned the Czech language, literature, history, and music, always her first love, and became a striking presence in Prague. A post-World War I edition of the works of the Czech nationalist composer Bedrich Smetana was dedicated to her as the "true friend of Smetana's genius." She had popularized his music through research and writing. Believing that the highest purpose of Christianity was to help those in need, Masaryk concerned herself with social problems. She worked in the Czech women's movement, bolstering it with her translation into Czech of John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women. She made her husband "the most influential male intellectual involved with the woman's movement." He later admitted that he was "only a peddler" of her opinions on women's rights and that she had authored Polygamy and Monogamy, one of his major statements favoring equality for women. In 1906 she demonstrated with workers demanding free and equal suffrage and the secret ballot. The next year she and her husband attended the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston where he spoke, arguing for a religious life transcending ecclesiastical forms of religion.
After he proved that Austro-Hungarian officials had forged documents to justify annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Thomas Masaryk was reviled in the empire, appreciated in the incubating "Czech nation," and internationally renowned. By 1913 he was the most beloved man in Prague. Charlotte Masaryk had worked with him to educate the Czech people for democracy, helping them overcome their prejudice and intolerance. "Without her," he later maintained, "I wouldn't have had a clear sense of . . my political task."
When World War I broke out, Thomas Masaryk, who was out of the country with his younger daughter Olga, was sentenced by Austro-Hungarian authorities to a traitor's death. He joined the Allied powers and worked to gain recognition for the Czechoslovak National Council. Austro-Hungarian forces persecuted his wife in Prague, sent their daughter Alice to prison in Vienna, and forced their younger son Jan into the army. Their older son Herbert died from typhus while working in a Galician refugee camp. Alone, harassed and ill from heart disease and depression, Charlotte Masaryk maintained her courage and gave her daughter Alice "the strength to go on" during her eight months in prison by writing her nearly a hundred wonderfully supportive letters.
In 1918 Czechoslovakia, the nation Thomas Masaryk had fathered, was recognized by France, England, and the United States. Under its new constitution he was elected its first president in 1920 and re-elected in1927 and 1934. Prevented by illness from participating fully in the victory she had helped win, Masaryk died at their summer home near Prague. Ever grateful for her help, her husband proclaimed that her uncompromising political positions and truthfulness had greatly influenced his development. She made it possible for him to accomplish concrete reforms by moderating the scope of his original designs. Czech writer Oldra Sedlmayer declared, "Neither golden letters nor marble monuments can express the moral contribution, the price in human suffering which that daughter of free America paid in the life and work of our president."
Charlotte Masaryk's family treasured the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn as the place where the seeds of her future strength had been planted. Both her husband and her son Jan spoke from its pulpit and her daughter Alice planned a stained glass window there in her memory. After World War II interrupted that plan, the women of the First Church in 1957 gave a clerestory window picturing Bohemian Reformer Jan Hus in memory of Charlotte Masaryk and in honor of John Howland Lathrop. Lathrop, the ninth minister of the First Church, headed a relief program in Czechoslovakia following World War II, which gave rise to the Unitarian Service Committee. Alice Garrigue Masaryk, Alice Garrigue Masaryk, 1879-1966: Her Life as Recorded in Her Own Words and by Her Friends (1980), contains many of her mother's letters. See also Barbara K. Reinfeld, "Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, 1850-1923," Czechoslovak and Central European Journal (Summer/Winter 1989): 90-103, Stanislav Polak, Charlotta Garrigue Masarykova (1992); and American National Biography, s.v. "Masaryk, Charlotte Garrigue." H. Gordon Skilling, T. G. Masaryk: Against the Current, 1882-1914 (1994), has considerable information. See also "Brooklyn's First Lady of Czechoslovakia," in Donald W. McKinney, When the Pulpit Starts to Creak (1992); Olive Hoogenboom, The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years (1987); Roman Szporluk, The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (1981); George J. Kovtun, Masaryk and America: Testimony of a Relationship (1988); and George J. Kovtun, ed., The Spirit of Thomas G. Masaryk (1850-1937): An Anthology (1990). A short obituary is in the New York Times, May 14, 1923.

Charlotte married Masaryk, President of Czechoslovakia Tomas Jan (Garrigue) on 15 Mar 1878 in New York's City Hall, New York, United States. Tomas was born on 7 Mar 1850 in Hodonin, Moravia, Slovakia; was christened on 7 Mar 1850 in Goeding, Hodonin, Czechoslovakia; died on 14 Sep 1937 in Lany, Bohemia. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

His son, Jan, was vice premier (1941-45) of Czechoslovak provisional government in London.
Jan Masaryk (1886–1948)
Anecdote... Early in his career, Jan Masaryk served as Czech ambassador to the United States. At a party he was prevailed upon by the hostess to play the violin. He graciously accepted the invitation and played a Czech nursery song, to rapturous applause from all present. He left the party with a Czech friend, who wanted to know why on earth he had been asked to play the violin. Masaryk explained: "Oh, it's all very simple—don't you see? They have mixed me up with my father; they mixed him up with Paderewski. And they mixed the piano up with the violin."
Biographical Note... son of the founding president of Czechoslovakia. He became foreign minister in London when the Czech government was in exile during World War II. He remained foreign minister after the war but died as a result of a "fall" from a window, not long after the Communist takeover in 1948.
Jan Masaryk died 54 years ago
[11-03-2002] By Pavla Horáková
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Two weeks after the Communist Party took over in Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk, the country's Foreign Minister was found dead. His body was found beneath his window in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry building. Jan Masaryk died 54 years ago, on March 10th, 1948 and the question as to whether he ended his own life or was killed by the Communists will probably never be answered. By Pavla Horakova.
Bust of Jan Masaryk, photo CTKJan Masaryk, a diplomat and the longest serving Minister of Foreign Affairs of pre-Communist Czechoslovakia was the son of the first president and founder of Czechoslovakia Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and his American-born wife Charlotte Garrigue. After his secondary studies in Prague, Jan left for the United States where he stayed until 1913. After independent Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, Jan Masaryk entered its diplomatic service. In 1919, he returned to the United States as Czechoslovakia's first charge d'affaires and in 1925, Masaryk was appointed ambassador to Great Britain. In protest against the 1939 Munich Agreement, Masaryk left the diplomatic service and in 1940, he became the foreign minister of the London-based Czechoslovak government in exile. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Masaryk spoke out about the situation and the fate of his country on the BBC in London and on September 8, 1939, he started a series of regular radio addresses to the Czechoslovak people. After the war, Jan Masaryk returned to Czechoslovakia, where he served again as a Foreign Minister - in what was known as the National Front government, which included the Communists. Jan Masaryk had to respect the Communists who won the 1946 election but he was wary of their aggression and Soviet expansionism. In 1947 Czechoslovakia agreed to participate in the US-funded Marshall plan - a decision unpalatable for the Soviets. In July 1947, Masaryk and the Communist Prime Minister Klement Gottwald went to Moscow to negotiate. "I left as a minister of a sovereign state but have come back as Stalin's lackey," Jan Masaryk said immediately after his return from the Soviet Union.
Jan Masaryk The events of 1947 gradually led to the Communist takeover in February 1948, when the majority of ministers, Jan Masaryk not included, handed over their resignation to president Benes in the hope that fresh elections would be held. Instead, the president accepted their resignations and a communist government headed by Klement Gottwald was formed. Jan Masaryk retained his post but was not sure whether his decision to stay in a communist government was right, and he even contemplated going into exile. Two weeks after the government was formed, Jan Masaryk met his end on the ground beneath his bathroom window.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit ] Private life
From 1924 until their divorce in 1931, Masaryk was married to Frances Crane Leatherbee. She was an heiress to the Crane plumbing and elevator fortune, the former wife of Robert Leatherbee, a daughter of Charles R. Crane , a U.S. minister to China, and a sister of Richard Teller Crane 2nd, a U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia. By that marriage, he had three stepchildren: Charles Leatherbee, Robert Leatherbee Jr., and Richard Crane Leatherbee.[2] Stepson Charles Leatherbee (Harvard 1929) co-founded the University Players , a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts , in 1928 with Bretaigne Windust . He married Mary Lee Logan, younger sister of Joshua Logan , who became one of the co-directors of the University Players in 1931.[2]
Masaryk was a skilled amateur pianist. In that capacity, he accompanied Jarmila Novotna in a recital of Czech folk songs issued on 78 RPM records to commemorate the victims of the Nazi eradication of Lidice .[3]
At the time of his death, Masaryk was reportedly planning to marry the American writer Marcia Davenport .
Masaryk was also a Master Mason.

[edit ] References
^ The Kremlin’s Killing Ways - by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, November 28, 2006

Family/Spouse: Crane, Francis. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]