Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [151]
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.”11
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.12
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.13
From Paris, Beneš 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. Beneš 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.14
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, Beneš 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