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Thousands of Sokols in their flashing uniforms—shirts of Garibaldi red, grey Czech jackets slung from their left shoulders, little round red caps with falcon feathers—last week poured into Prague's big, bustling Masaryk and Wilson (named after Woodrow Wilson) railway stations, stomped out to the mammoth Masaryk Stadium,* high above the silvery Vltava River and the cathedral towers of the capital. There, in white jerseys and blue trousers and skirts, they twisted and bent in mass exercise. Before the month is over, 160,000 members will have participated in such elaborate drills.
This year's Congress, expected to draw a million Czech and foreign visitors, marks the 20th anniversary of the birth of the nation. An allegorical pageant, "Construction and Defense," to be performed by 3,000 members eight times during the Congress, will picture the republic's 20 years, the Sokol contributions to its development.
Birth, Czechoslovakia, some 600 miles long but only 45 to 175 miles wide, has four provinces. Were it a fish the head would be Bohemia, inhabited largely by Czechs with Germans predominating along the western Sudeten border. The body would be the provinces of Moravia & Silesia, largely Czech populated, and Slovakia, thick with Slovaks, who are Slavs like the Czechs. The tail would be Carpathian Ruthenia.
The Czechs enjoyed independence under their own rulers from the tenth to the early 16th Century. At that time they gradually were subjected to Habsburg domination and in 1620, the Czech nobles were wiped out at the Battle of the White Mountain. Over a thousand years ago the Slovaks had been beaten into submission by the Hungarian Magyars. Through the centuries these peoples, like the Poles and the Irish, kept alive their national culture, agitated for liberation. The World War and Woodrow Wilson gave them their chance. Three Czech patriots actually achieved the nation's independence: gaunt, bearded Philosophy Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, who died nine months ago; the Czech soldier-astronomer General Milan Stefánik, who was killed in an airplane crash in 1919 when freedom was in sight; and Eduard Benes.
Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's No. 1 George Washington, dreamed, wrote and taught a Czech national state during his university careers in Vienna and Prague. When the World War broke out, with a death sentence over his head, he shuttled between London, Paris. Russia, raising money and sympathy for his unborn nation. His assistant, Eduard Benes, meanwhile, faked passports, forged visas for Czech conspirators, escaped to Switzerland, then Paris where he and Masaryk set up a pre-natal National Council. The Allies were more than willing to foster a separatist movement in the heart of the Central Powers, and in 1917 Professor Masaryk set out for the U. S., there convinced Professor Wilson of the Czech case. Washington, D. C. is to the Czechoslovakian Republic what Philadelphia, Pa. is to the U. S. Republic. In Washington, in October 1918, after conferences with U. S. Czechs and Slovaks, Masaryk issued a Declaration of Independence for the new Czech-Slovak state and almost immediately after the Armistice a newly-convened National Assembly gratefully elected him the nation's first President.