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The late fabulous Charles R. Crane of Chicago, wealthy plumbing man and world traveler, brought the Professor to the U.S. In 1902 Masaryk was called to occupy, for a year, the chair of Slavonic Studies that Crane had set up at the University of Chicago. (Twenty-two years later, young Masaryk met and married Crane's daughter Frances Crane Leatherbee; they were divorced in 1931.) Thus began Masaryk's conquest of the U.S. for the cause of his people's rebirth. It ended, in 1918, with President Wilson's acceptance of that cause and Masaryk's Declaration of Czechoslovak Independence in Washington. Supported by 1,500,000 Americans of Czechoslovak descent, and by parallel Czechoslovak action in Russia and France, an aged philosopher had performed one of the major miracles of the epoch: the deliverance of a nation across 3,000 miles of water. The son of a Slovak coachman restored the pride in nationhood King Charles IV had brought to Bohemia 600 years before.
Burdened by a father who belonged to history, young Jan preferred to clown his way out of such embarrassment. He is as handy with unprintable stories as the Great Old Man was with the terms of Aristotle.
Today, "young" Jan Masaryk is 57 and the most popular diplomat in London—the most welcome of all those Continental statesmen who habitually visit the U.S. Full of bounce and zest and a bravura that was once described as "something out of the pages of Dumas," the tall (6 ft. 2 in.) extrovert has a selling power that could make Eskimos buy iceboxes. He looks like, and has all the making of, a successful American business man, an elegant European bon vivant, a world-famous orchestra leader, a magnetic political boss. But from his thin lips sometimes come words of genuine wisdom, and around his dark eyes are shadows of more experience than a playboy knows.
Equally at home in a waterfront tavern or in the salon of British kings (he was a personal friend of the late George V), he knows the world because he was bitten by it. When the Professor came back from Chicago, 20-year-old Jan got $80 from him and went to the U.S. The high-tension intellectuality of his father's house was too much for him ("the house was full of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Dostoevski"). His preference for America was motivated by more than the Continental legends of the Wild West and his father's limited U.S. experience: Jan's mother, Brooklyn-born Charlotte Garrigue (Thomas Masaryk had respectfully added her name to his), had brought an American atmosphere right into the Masaryk home. "Mother always had confidence in me," remembers Jan, "and I did everything in my power to destroy that confidence, but it wasn't any good."
In the U.S., Jan made a living as an ironworker and works manager in the Crane Co. (as a movie pianist on the side). "The only thing I know about diplomacy," says Minister Masaryk, "I learned in the iron foundry of the Crane Co. There were Slovaks, Swedes, Poles, Norwegians—absolutely everyone. I bought a blackboard and four times a week I taught them to read and to write. That was the strongest influence of my Europeanism."