The Washington Declaration

On 18 October 1918 Tomáš Masaryk, chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, delivered to the US State Department the final text of the declaration of independence of the Czechoslovak nation. The document was written in Washington, which is why it went down in history as the Washington Declaration, but it was dated “Paris, 18 October 1918”. Paris was the seat of the provisional government into which the National Council had transformed itself a few days earlier. It was signed by Masaryk as prime minister and minister of finance, Milan Rastislav Štefánik as minister of national defence and Edvard Beneš as minister of foreign affairs and of the interior. The next morning, 19 October, American newspapers printed the text. The British chronology of the war recorded the Czechoslovaks’ proclamation of independence only under 21 October, but the document itself is dated 18 October and reached the United States government that day.

A race with the imperial manifesto

According to the recollections of one of Masaryk’s American friends, an editor of The Washington Post, as late as August the chairman of the Council had shown him a draft statement that demanded autonomy under the Habsburg sceptre rather than full independence. Vienna’s autumn diplomacy hurried him on. Austria-Hungary asked President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points, the tenth of which promised the peoples of the monarchy only “the freest opportunity to autonomous development”. On 16 October Emperor Karl issued a manifesto announcing the reconstruction of the Austrian half of the monarchy as a federal state. Masaryk knew of these plans from his informants and wanted the American government to hold an unequivocal statement from the Czechs and Slovaks before Wilson answered Vienna. He regarded the manifesto as the last effort of a drowning man, which might nevertheless still impress those who continued to sympathise with Austria.

According to Czech accounts, Masaryk wrote a lengthy draft in Czech, and his secretary translated it into English. The text was read and corrected by Masaryk’s American friends, among them Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, journalists and the sociology professor Herbert Adolphus Miller. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum is said to have proposed the layout of the document. A small committee including lawyers finalised it on the night of 16/17 October. Masaryk had handed the draft to Secretary of State Robert Lansing on 16 October, and on 18 October he sent the final version. In his covering letter he wrote that since Lansing had not expressed a view on the timing of publication, and events in Austria-Hungary were moving fast, he was publishing the declaration that same day.

What was proclaimed

The declaration opened by referring to the moment: the Hohenzollerns were offering peace in order to halt the victorious advance of the Allies, and the Habsburgs were promising federalisation and autonomy. The National Council, recognised by the Allies as a provisional government, stated that “federalisation, and still more autonomy, means nothing under a Habsburg sovereign”. It invoked the declaration of the Czech deputies adopted in Prague on 6 January 1918 and the “historic and natural right” of the nation. It recalled that in 1526 Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia had voluntarily joined Austria and Hungary in defence against the Turks, and that the Habsburgs had broken this compact. It demanded the union of the Czech lands with Slovakia, which it called a severed part of the national state. A long argument accused the dualist monarchy of oppressing the Slavs and of unleashing the war without the consent of the peoples’ representatives. At the end of this part the document declared the Habsburg dynasty unworthy of ruling the nation and stated that, since the nation had once itself elected it to the Bohemian throne, by the same right it now deposed it.

The second part set out the constitution of the new state. The authors invoked the principles proclaimed by Wilson, the United States Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as the tradition of the Hussite Wars and “the nation of Comenius”. The Czechoslovak state was to be a republic. It promised freedom of conscience, religion, science and art, speech, the press, assembly and petition, the separation of Church and State, universal suffrage and equal rights for women, proportional representation, equal rights for national minorities and parliamentary government. The standing army was to be replaced by a militia. Social reforms were announced, along with the buying-out of the great landed estates for settlement and the abolition of titles of nobility. The new state was to take over part of the monarchy’s pre-war debt, but not the war debts, which it left to those who had incurred them. Final decisions on the constitution belonged to the nation’s future elected representatives. The text ended with the words: “We believe in democracy, we believe in liberty, and liberty evermore.”

The declaration spoke of a single Czechoslovak nation and did not repeat the promise of a separate Slovak administration, diet and courts made in the Pittsburgh Agreement, which Masaryk had concluded with émigrés in May. Slovak advocates of autonomy later held this against it. Štefánik’s signature was also disputed: he was then far from Washington, on his way to Siberia, and according to some accounts learned only after the event that his name stood under the document.

Washington’s reply

That same day or the next (19 October according to American documents) Lansing handed the Swedish minister, who represented Austria-Hungary’s interests in Washington, the President’s reply to the Austrian note. In it Wilson wrote that, after the recognition of the Czechoslovaks as a belligerent and of the National Council as a de facto government, which the United States had granted in September, mere autonomy for the peoples of the monarchy could no longer be the basis of peace. From now on it was for those peoples themselves to decide what would satisfy them. It is not known exactly how far the declaration contributed to this decision. The Czech historian Jan Blahoslav Kozák believed that it was not the declaration that changed the President’s views, but rather his attitude that prompted Masaryk to hurry. According to Czech accounts, on 18 October Wilson wrote to Masaryk that he had read the declaration, had been moved by it, and that Masaryk would be satisfied with the reply to Vienna.

On the morning of 19 October the American press printed Emperor Karl’s manifesto and the Czechoslovak declaration side by side. The Washington Post wrote that the two documents showed the difference between true and false freedom. The provisional government which Beneš had announced in Paris on 14 October was recognised by France the next day and, according to Czech accounts, by Britain and Italy in the following days. On 26 October Masaryk presided in Independence Hall in Philadelphia over a gathering of representatives of the nations of Central Europe, who signed a declaration of common aims there. In the Czech lands themselves, however, Austrian rule lasted another ten days.