Just as World War I came to an end, the remarkable partnership of a Czechoslovak patriot and a visionary American president set the stage for the first western-style democracy in Central Europe. In 1918, following the War, the nation of Czechoslovakia was formed from the war-torn lands of Austria-Hungary, giving Czechs and Slovaks the chance to control their own destiny as a free nation. While the First Czechoslovak Republic was suppressed by Hitler after only 20 years, the beliefs of these two leaders – Woodrow Wilson and Tomáš G. Masaryk – remain no less compelling more than a century after World War I.