RADIĆ, ANTE. - Croatian politician, b. at Trebarjevo Desno on 11 June 1868, d. at Zagreb on 10 Feb. 1919. After studies at Zagreb and Vienna he became a secondary school teacher.
From 1903 to 1909 he served as 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, together with his brother Stjepan, he founded the Croatian People’s Peasant Party, through which he succeeded in being elected deputy three times. A driving force behind the peasant-oriented journal Dom (Home), he himself wrote most of its articles, advocating the ideal of the domestic hearth and the struggle for the social and political rights of the peasantry, the backbone of the nation and guardians of the patrimony of “self-ownership” against the alien element of the gospođa (nobility and bourgeoisie), thus deeply influencing the development of Croatia’s entire national life.
He wrote Život t. j. smrt hrvatskoga preporoda (Life i.e. Death of the Croatian National Revival) (Zagreb 1899), and in collaboration with his brother Sto je i što hoče hrvatska pučka seljačka stranka? (What is and What the Croatian People’s Peasant Party Wants?) (ibid. 1908), as well as numerous other essays and articles of a political, cultural-political, philological, and especially ethnographic and folkloric character; fundamental is Osnova za sabiranje i proučavanje građa o narodnom životu (Foundations for the Collection and Study of Material on National Life) (2nd ed., Zagreb 1929). The Opera omnia of A. R. appeared in 19 volumes in Zagreb (1936–38).