Where the Iron Curtain Was Born (In Missouri!)

Churchill delivering his speech, on March 5, 1946.

(Courtesy of the Churchill Memorial and Library)

As Winston Churchill’s train steamed east from Fulton, Missouri, on March 6, 1946, a ton of hot dogs were left uneaten at Westminster College, where he had received an honorary degree the day before.

The college had expected 40,000 people for the ex-Prime Minister’s speech, but little more than half that many had shown up. Nevertheless, his words were already filtering out to a wider audience. By the time he arrived in New York a few days later, police had to hold back violent mobs protesting his assertions. No one wanted to believe it, but, just as he had 10 years earlier, Churchill had seen the future. The crowd in Fulton may have been small, but his speech’s true, captive audience would be the entire world for the balance of the century.

Today, his hosts at Westminster College celebrate the renovation of their museum dedicated to the man who 60 years ago Sunday inaugurated the Cold War by announcing, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

If small-town Missouri seems an unlikely site for a museum devoted to Winston Churchill, much less for his epoch-making speech, remember who was President in 1946. Harry Truman, a native of Independence, had arranged for his friend, recently ousted from power, to visit the campus. Having shepherded Britain through the trials of World War II, Churchill was defeated for reelection in 1945 and left to head the opposition party in Parliament. When Truman invited him to speak at Westminster College, neither the fittingness of the school’s name—which Churchill quipped was “somehow familiar to me”—nor the opportunity to warn the world of looming dangers was lost on him. As he traveled 5,000 miles from Parliament in one Westminster to a gymnasium stage in the other, he put the finishing touches on a quintessential Churchill speech, one that was bold, expertly written, and prophetic.

Visitors to Fulton today can relive his address in one of the museum’s new interactive exhibits, part of a $4 million renovation. Among artifacts like the homemade banners that greeted him in 1946 and the map of his motorcade route through downtown Fulton, museumgoers can watch as one of the builders of the Grand Alliance acknowledges its demise. The museum’s 12-minute film montage of Churchill’s lengthy speech hits all the famous high notes but also dispels some popular misconceptions.

Churchill’s “iron curtain” entered the lexicon immediately; behind the real thing, he warned in husky tones, “lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. . . . and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” No one as powerful as Churchill had spoken so boldly about Soviet expansion before. But rather than retreat into renewed isolationism, as he feared the U.S. was doing, America and the countries of Europe must forge a “new unity,” he said, and meet the Soviet threat with both strict readiness and a willingness to negotiate.

Many in the West, exhausted from six years of war, did not want to hear anything about a new enemy. Congressmen said they were “shocked” by Churchill’s words; one New York City paper called the speech an “ideological declaration of war against Russia.” Stalin, for his part, agreed, pronouncing Churchill “a warmonger.” Churchill, of course, had been in this position before. In the 1930s, exiled from power for economic missteps he made as chancellor of the exchequer, he fought in vain against the Nazi-appeasing policies of the British government and “cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.” But as the museum’s carefully chosen speech excerpts reveal, those who thought Churchill was now advocating war were wrong. Hoping to avoid the mistakes of the previous decade, he pointedly titled his address “The Sinews of Peace”—a peace achievable only by restraint—and described the inevitable devastation of a war in the atomic age. At bottom, his message in Fulton was to capitalize on Soviet interests to avoid conflict.

In the early 1960s, well into the Cold War Churchill foretold, Westminster’s administrators looked for some way to commemorate his visit. Oddly enough, the destruction wrought on Britain under his rule provided an opportunity. Westminster decided to transport and reconstruct, brick by brick, London’s Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, which had been redesigned by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666 and all but demolished in the blitzkrieg. Churchill, appreciating the significance of rebuilding from the rubble of war, approved. In 1969, four years after his death, Westminster College dedicated the Churchill Memorial and Library in the completed church.

Now, nearly 40 years later, the Cold War is over, but Churchill’s ideals—vigilance, democracy, freedom—are just as relevant. So Westminster decided to give its galleries on the lion of the twentieth century a twenty-first-century update. In the museum’s new permanent collection, multimedia exhibits trace Churchill’s life, philosophy, and writing, concentrating heavily on World War II and the “Sinews of Peace” speech; a “leadership corridor” compares him with other British and American rulers. The rededication kicks off tonight with a talk by Churchill’s daughter and granddaughter and continues over the weekend with a community luncheon, black-tie gala, and a keynote address by the TV news anchor Chris Matthews.

Another exhibit, dedicated to the Cold War itself, shows how true Churchill’s predictions proved to be. Of course his vindication was a long time coming. When he arrived in Richmond three days after his Westminster speech to address the Virginia General Assembly, he acknowledged the controversy he had created. “You have not asked to see beforehand what I am going to say,” he remarked to the legislators. “I might easily blurt out a lot of things people know in their hearts are true but are a bit shy of saying in public.”

For information about Westminster College’s Churchill Memorial and Library and this weekend’s events, go to www.westminster-mo.edu/cm/.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.