Radić, Ante

RADIĆ, ANTE. - Croatian politician, b. at Trebarjevo Desno on 11 June 1868, d. at Zagreb on 10 Feb. 1919. After his studies in Zagreb and Vienna he became a gymnasium professor.

From 1903 to 1909 he was secretary of the Matica Hrvatska in Zagreb, where in the struggle between the "old" and the "young" he was a bitter opponent of the latter. In 1904 he founded, together with his brother Stjepan, the Croatian People's Peasant Party, thanks to which he was elected deputy three times. As the animator of the journal Dom ("Hearth") for the peasants, he himself compiled most of its articles, upholding in it the ideal of the domestic hearth and of the struggle for the social and political rights of that class, the backbone of the people and the preserver of the "autochthonous" heritage, against the other, alien element of the gospoda (nobility and bourgeoisie), thereby profoundly influencing the development of the whole of Croatian national life.

He wrote Život t. j. smrt hrvatskoga preporoda (Zagreb 1899), and in collaboration with his brother Što je i što hoće hrvatska pučka seljačka stranka? (ibid. 1908), as well as numerous other essays and articles of a political, cultural-political, philological, and especially ethnographic and folkloristic character; fundamental is Osnova za zabiranje i proučavanje gradje o narodnom životu (2nd ed. Zagreb 1929). The Opera omnia of A. R. appeared in 19 vols. at Zagreb 1936-38.

Ivan Vitezić