Westminster College: Where Churchill Drew the Iron Curtain

In the spring of nineteen forty-six, the most recognizable man in the world climbed onto a gymnasium stage at a small Presbyterian college in Fulton, Missouri, introduced by the president of the United States, and delivered a forty-six-minute lecture that named the central conflict of the next half century.

Westminster College had been founded in eighteen fifty-one, chartered by Presbyterians in the heart of what Missourians called the Kingdom of Callaway. It was a respected regional institution, but not a place where world history was expected to be made. That changed on March fifth, nineteen forty-six, when Sir Winston Churchill arrived in Fulton with President Harry Truman, the only native Missourian ever to serve in the White House. Truman had personally written Churchill to encourage the visit and introduced him to an audience of fifteen hundred gathered in the college gymnasium.

Churchill's speech, formally titled Sinews of Peace, contained the phrase that would echo for decades. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," he said, "an iron curtain has descended across the continent." The image was not entirely new, but Churchill's use of it before a packed American audience, backed by a sitting president, transformed it into the defining metaphor of the Cold War. The speech argued that the United States and Britain needed to confront an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union rather than retreat into the post-war optimism that dominated much of public opinion at the time.

Historians have debated ever since whether the Fulton speech marked the beginning of the Cold War or merely named a conflict already underway. What is not in dispute is its lasting weight. The bombed-out Christopher Wren church of Saint Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury was later dismantled and reconstructed stone by stone on the Westminster campus and now stands as a memorial to Churchill and the speech. The building also houses America's National Churchill Museum, drawing visitors to this small Missouri college town to stand in the place where the postwar world first heard its own name.