Iron Curtain Speech (1946): Churchill at Fulton, Missouri

The Iron Curtain speech was the address Winston Churchill gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, in which he warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” of Europe. Officially titled “The Sinews of Peace”, it described the growing Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe and called for an Anglo-American alliance to resist it.

Delivered less than a year after the end of the war in Europe, with President Harry Truman sitting on the platform, the speech was controversial at the time. Within a few years its central image had become the standard way to describe the Cold War division of Europe.

Background

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin had agreed on the occupation of Germany and promised free elections in liberated countries. By the end of the year, the reality looked very different. Soviet-backed communists held key ministries across the region occupied by the Red Army, opposition parties in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria faced intimidation, and arguments over Germany and reparations had soured the alliance.

Churchill had led Britain through the war but lost the general election of July 1945, in the middle of the Potsdam Conference. As Leader of the Opposition he had more freedom to speak his mind than a serving prime minister. He had been worried about Soviet intentions since at least the spring of 1945; on 12 May 1945 he had already used the phrase “iron curtain” in a telegram to Truman about the Soviet front line in Europe.

American policy was also changing. In February 1946 Stalin gave a speech stressing the incompatibility of capitalism and communism, and on 22 February the American diplomat George Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” from Moscow, arguing that Soviet power could only be contained by firm and patient resistance. Churchill’s speech landed in a Washington that was already reconsidering its approach.

The invitation to Fulton

The invitation came from Franc McCluer, president of Westminster College, a small Presbyterian college in Fulton, Missouri, which hosted an annual lecture series. McCluer used his connection with a fellow Missourian, Truman, who added a handwritten note to the letter promising to introduce Churchill if he accepted. Churchill, who was spending the winter in Florida, agreed.

Churchill and Truman travelled together by train from Washington to Missouri, playing poker and discussing the text. Truman read a draft on the journey and later said he had not seen it in advance, a claim historians have treated with scepticism. Churchill had also discussed his ideas with British officials and with Secretary of State James Byrnes.

The speech

On 5 March 1946 Churchill received an honorary degree from Westminster College and spoke in the college gymnasium. Large crowds lined the streets of the town, and the speech was broadcast by radio and filmed for newsreels.

He opened by praising the United States as standing “at the pinnacle of world power” and spoke of the need to prevent war and tyranny. He supported the new United Nations but argued that it needed real strength behind it. He then called for what he named a “special relationship” between the British Commonwealth and the United States, including shared military bases and close cooperation between their armed forces.

The most famous passage followed. Churchill declared: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Behind that line, he said, lay all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe, including Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, increasingly subject to control from Moscow. Communist parties, small in number in these countries, were being raised to power far beyond their real support.

Churchill insisted that he did not believe the Soviet Union wanted war. What it wanted, he argued, were the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of its power and doctrines. He concluded that the Soviet leaders admired strength above all and that the lesson of the 1930s was that weakness and appeasement invited aggression. The answer was unity between the English-speaking democracies and a firm stand in good time.

Reception

The immediate reaction was mixed and often hostile. Many Americans still saw the Soviet Union as a wartime ally and feared being drawn into Britain’s quarrels or the defence of its empire. Several newspapers, including liberal and isolationist ones, criticised the speech as warmongering, and some members of Congress objected to the idea of a permanent alliance with Britain. In Britain, a group of Labour MPs tabled a motion criticising it.

Truman distanced himself from the speech in public, saying he had not known its content beforehand. Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government also kept its distance, while privately sharing many of Churchill’s concerns.

Stalin’s response came in an interview published in Pravda on 14 March 1946. He called the speech a “dangerous act” and accused Churchill of calling for war against the Soviet Union. He compared Churchill to Hitler, arguing that he was promoting a racial theory in which only English-speaking nations were fully valuable. The Soviet press presented the speech as evidence of Western hostility.

Key people

Winston Churchill (1874–1965) had been Britain’s wartime prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and returned to office from 1951 to 1955. The Fulton speech was one of several post-war addresses, along with his speech in Zurich in September 1946 calling for a “United States of Europe”, in which he set out his vision of the post-war world.

Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) had become US president on Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. His presence on the platform gave the speech its significance, and within a year he adopted a policy close to the one Churchill had urged.

Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), the Soviet leader, treated the speech as a declaration of Western hostility and used it to justify tighter control over the Soviet sphere.

Franc McCluer (1896–1972), president of Westminster College, arranged the invitation that brought Churchill to Fulton.

Consequences

The speech did not by itself change policy, but it gave a powerful public voice to ideas that were spreading in Washington and London. During 1946 and 1947 the US government moved steadily towards a firmer stance. In March 1947 Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, promising support to free peoples resisting outside pressure, and in June 1947 the Marshall Plan offered economic aid to rebuild Europe.

Events in Europe seemed to confirm Churchill’s warnings. Communist parties took full control in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 shocked Western opinion. The Soviet blockade of Berlin followed later that year. By 1949 the creation of NATO had produced the kind of Western alliance Churchill had called for, though on a broader basis than an Anglo-American partnership.

The phrase “iron curtain” passed into everyday language. Over the next decades it came to describe the fortified border of fences, minefields and watchtowers that divided Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and, after 1961, the Berlin Wall.

Myths and facts

Myth: Churchill invented the term “iron curtain”. The metaphor was older. It had been used of Bolshevik Russia after 1917, including by the British writer Ethel Snowden in 1920, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used a German equivalent in February 1945. Churchill had used it privately in 1945. What Fulton did was make it famous.

Myth: The speech started the Cold War. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the Western powers were already growing, and both sides had taken positions before Churchill spoke. The speech described and dramatised the division rather than creating it.

Myth: Churchill called for war against the Soviet Union. He explicitly said he did not believe war was inevitable or imminent. His argument was that strength and unity would prevent war, not that the West should attack.

Legacy

Westminster College became a place of Cold War memory. In the 1960s the bombed Church of St Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, a Christopher Wren church from the City of London, was moved stone by stone to the campus and rebuilt as a memorial to Churchill. It now houses the National Churchill Museum. In 1990 a sculpture called “Breakthrough”, made by Churchill’s granddaughter Edwina Sandys from sections of the Berlin Wall, was dedicated nearby.

Later speakers at Fulton included Mikhail Gorbachev, who in May 1992 reflected there on the end of the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher in 1996. The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, another phrase the speech popularised, remains a standard term in diplomacy.

Timeline

• 1945, 12 May: Churchill uses the phrase “iron curtain” in a telegram to President Truman.
• 1945, 26 July: Churchill’s Conservatives lose the British general election; he becomes Leader of the Opposition.
• 1946, 22 February: George Kennan sends the “Long Telegram” from Moscow.
• 1946, 4–5 March: Churchill and Truman travel by train from Washington to Missouri.
• 1946, 5 March: Churchill delivers “The Sinews of Peace” at Westminster College, Fulton.
• 1946, 14 March: Stalin denounces the speech in an interview in Pravda.
• 1947, 12 March: Truman announces the Truman Doctrine.
• 1992, 6 May: Mikhail Gorbachev speaks at Westminster College.

Why it matters

The Iron Curtain speech gave the Cold War its most enduring image and helped prepare Western opinion for a long confrontation with the Soviet Union. It also defined the idea of a special Anglo-American partnership. The division it described lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.