Please join us November 18, 2022 in Washington, DC for our rescheduled dinner marking institute founder Charles R. Crane’s friendship with Tomas Masaryk, first president of independent Czechoslovakia. Crane (above left) invited Masaryk (right) to the United States in 1902 to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Chicago. They would go on to develop a close personal relationship that would serve as an important link between their two countries.
The New York Times‘s Roger Cohen will deliver the keynote speech about his reporting in Ukraine and the future of Europe. He is the Times Paris bureau chief, longtime columnist and former foreign editor.
We’ll also hear about some of the motivations behind Crane’s interest in Czechoslovakia and other Slavic countries from his great-grandson, the historian Joseph Bradley.
And we’ll be raising a glass to retuning fellow Astha Rajvanshi, who will be reporting earlier in the day on her fellowship investigating the rights of women and other minorities in India (details coming soon). She has since won New York University’s Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award and a Tiny Foundation Fellowship for Investigative Journalism, and is starting as a staff writer for TIME’s international desk in London.
We look forward to an excellent time reconvening with old friends and meeting new ones in person for the first time since the onset of the pandemic!
Keynote speaker
Roger Cohen is a journalist and author. He is currently Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined the paper in 1990 and has variously worked as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor and a columnist. Cohen’s books include Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, an account of the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction and Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble. He has also co-written a biography of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, In the Eye of the Storm.
Annual Dinner
Friday, November 18, 2022
Cosmos Club, Washington, D.C.
6:30 p.m.
RSVP to Bruce Teeter
Crane and Czechoslovakia
Before he founded ICWA in 1925, Charles Crane was already deeply involved in world affairs. The philanthropist, diplomat and friend and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson served in multiple roles in Russia, China, the Middle East and elsewhere.
His family connection to Czechoslovakia deepened when Masaryk’s son Jan married Crane’s daughter Frances Crane Leatherbee in 1924. Crane also became a strong supporter of Czechoslovak culture and financed Alphonse Mucha’s Slavonic Epic paintings. Mucha later incorporated his portrait of Crane’s daughter Josephine Crane Bradley in his design for the first Czechoslovak 100 koruna banknote.
When an American mission was sent to the new Czechoslovakia, Crane’s son Richard Teller Crane II was the first diplomat to be accredited.
Czech President Milos Zeman posthumously awarded Charles Crane the Order of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk in 2017.