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By Root 1060 0

Czechs or both. In April the peacemakers encouraged Paderewski and Beneš to talk directly to each other. When those discussions failed to produce anything, the peacemakers fell back on a plebiscite. In the summer of 1919 the Polish government, thinking it would win, agreed; the Czechoslovak, for the opposite reason, did not. A year later the Czechs, who had been busy making propaganda in their part of Teschen, were all for consulting the inhabitants, but the Poles had changed their minds. Riots and strikes made a vote impossible and in July 1920 the powers finally made their decision. Czechoslovakia got the coal mines. The little city of Teschen was cut in two; the old part went to Poland and the suburbs with the railway station to Czechoslovakia. One state got the electric power plant, the other the gasworks. It was the sort of settlement being made all over Central Europe as modern ethnic nationalism superimposed itself on an older, different world. And two nations who should have been friends now resented each other.30

Poland thought briefly of seizing Teschen but all its resources were being poured into the war with Russia. It never forgave Czechoslovakia for taking advantage of that desperate struggle and for a conspicuous lack of sympathy—for example, the Czechs held up badly needed weapons being shipped from Austria. On October 1, 1938, the day after the Munich agreement dismembered Czechoslovakia, the Polish government demanded the return of Teschen. It was followed by Hungary with a demand for Slovakia and the Ruthenian territories on the south slopes of the Carpathians.31

The newborn democratic Czechoslovakia was based on shaky foundations. The Allies had created a state, according to the leader of the Austrian socialists, out of several nations, “all filled with hatred one against the other, arrested in their whole economic and social development and in the progress of their civilisation by hate and national strife, nourished by tyranny and poisoning their whole public life.” There was some truth in what he said. Out of Czechoslovakia’s population of some 14 million, 3 million were German, 700,000 Hungarian and 550,000 Ruthenian, with a sprinkling of Poles and Gypsies. Czechs and Slovaks together made up the other two thirds, but they had much to divide them. The Czech lands were indelibly marked by Austrian rule, as was Slovakia by Hungarian. The Czechs felt that they were bringing progress and civilization to a backwater, and the Slovaks resented this. The Czechs, who dominated the national government, resisted giving Slovakia the autonomy Masaryk had promised so freely in Pittsburgh, on the grounds that there were not enough educated Slovaks to run their own government; more important, they did not want to encourage the Germans, or the Ruthenians or the Hungarians, to ask for similar rights.32

Early in 1919 there was a warning of what was to come when Slovakia’s economy took a sudden turn for the worse. It was now cut off from Hungarian markets and Hungarian coal. Sugar beets lay rotting in the fields; refineries closed down. Slovak farmers and workers were rioting, reported an American observer, saying, in effect, to their new government in Prague, “We thank you for nothing. You say you have rescued us from the political oppression of the Hungarians which was in fact pretty bad but now we are under martial law, we have no work, little food, we suffer from cold and our future is black.” Local priests spoke of their fears for Catholicism at the hands of the Protestant Czechs. That summer, when Czechoslovakia and Hungary clashed, advancing Czech troops were attacked in the rear by Slovaks.33

In September, House’s confidential aide Stephen Bonsal received a visit from two Slovaks, who complained that they had been prevented from leaving Czechoslovakia and had reached Paris only after an arduous journey through Yugoslavia, Italy and Switzerland. They begged him to see their leader, an ailing priest named Father Andrej Hlinka. The American and his Slovak escort rushed through Paris, doubling back on themselves