John Crane was the institute’s first fellow, in newly independent Czechoslovakia. Like his father and ICWA cofounder Charles Crane, he was an ardent champion of Czechoslovakian independence and a friend of the country’s first president, Tomáš Masaryk. When he arrived in Prague after graduating from Harvard University in 1921, his older brother, Richard Crane, was already there as the first US ambassador to the new country. John Crane would become Masaryk’s personal secretary; they maintained a lifelong friendship, reinforced by family ties: Crane’s sister Frances married Masaryk’s son and future foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, in 1924.
Crane went on to write about Central Europe in numerous articles, and his first book, The Little Entente (1931), in addition to teaching at the University of Chicago. Together with his wife, Sylvia Crane, he also wrote the monograph Czechoslovakia: Anvil of the Cold War (1990), which covers the country’s independence struggle and development through the post-World War II period.