Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (sometimes anglicised to Thomas Masaryk (7 March 1850 – 14 September 1937), was a Czech politician, statesman, sociologist and philosopher. After trying to reform the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into a federal state, with the help of the Allied Powers, he eventually succeeded in gaining Czechoslovak independence as a republic after World War I. He both founded and was the first President of Czechoslovakia and so is called the "President Liberator". Masaryk was born to a poor working-class family in the predominantly Catholic city of Hodonín, Moravia (in the region of Moravian Slovakia, today in the Czech Republic but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Another tradition claims the nearby Slovak village of Kopčany, the home of his father, as his birthplace.