After the dust settled from World War II, a new kind of tension began to grip the world. Our former ally, the Soviet Union, was quickly becoming a formidable adversary, leaving a massive division between East and West and stoking fears of another global conflict. It was at this critical moment in American history that a legendary figure, Winston Churchill, stepped forward to give a powerful speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. This address would not only define the escalating Cold War but also famously name the “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe, a phrase that would shape the next half-century of international relations.
At a low point in his political career, Churchill received an invitation from Westminster College, made all the more significant by a handwritten note from President Harry Truman himself. Though speaking as a private citizen, his words carried immense weight, delivered with Truman by his side during a truly perilous post-war era. With the Soviet Union’s aggressive moves and the chilling specter of nuclear weapons looming, the world desperately needed clarity and courage. Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech didn’t just name the new global conflict; it laid out a grand ambition for the health, safety, and freedom of every home, setting the stage for decades of the fight for democracy against communist expansion.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
After World War II, the Soviet Union, our former ally, had become anything but, and the threat of another world war hung over the heads of everyone. After they would renege on treaties and stand diametrically opposed to the West, a massive division was appearing between us and them. The person who would give a name to this division was Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. After being invited to speak there at a low point in his career. Here’s Dr. Larry Arnn with a story of the Iron Curtain Speech.
It was a world-changing fact when he got this invitation, and he came in at a low moment for him. The July 5th, 1945, election, when they got the votes counted, Churchill had lost in a landslide. And then in October, three months after, he gets this letter from the president of Westminster College, a man named Maclay, and, “Come and give a talk.” And there’s a P.S. handwritten by Harry Truman: “It’s a wonderful college in my home state. If you can come, I will introduce you.”
And that’s a…
Big deal. And that’s, you know, wow, he’s an important man still. Then, of course, you never can know when you’ve been the most important man in the world whether you will be after you lose your job. Churchill gets there the day before March 4th, 1946. And it’s very important that Churchill is a private citizen. I mean, he’s a member of Parliament, but he’s not an officer or representative of the government. And it’s also important that with the Labor government, with whom Churchill disagreed about everything and fought like cats and dogs with him. They agreed on one thing, and that was policy toward the Soviet Union. And so,
Churchill was liberated by that.
If the government had been putting fetters on him, it could have been a flap and messed up everything.
It’s worth saying. The man who is the Foreign…
Minister in that government was a left-wing union organizer that Churchill met during a big strike in the twenties and fell in love with him and brought him into the government, and he became a very important man, and he was faithful to his anti-communism. And, you know, the world was hanging on a thread. There are a whole bunch of events going on in the world. The Soviet Union announced that they would not leave Persia on the treaty-bound date that they were supposed to, and they were putting pressure on the Turks. And, you know, Turkey is important to the Soviet Union. They’ve always been tensions between them because they’re at the mouth of the Black Sea, and if the Soviet Union can control that, it can get into the Mediterranean. A few days before this invitation, Truman sent the body of the lately-died Turkish ambassador back to Turkey with a huge naval flotilla led by the USS Missouri, the biggest battleship in the world, the one on which the Japanese surrender was taken. The Soviet Union had overwhelming power. They had a multiple of the tanks of the United States, multiple of the fighter aircraft. We began a big build campaign about these years after the war, having stopped for a while, and they still gained on us. And the fear was, if the Soviet Union attacks to the West, they will reach the Channel in six weeks, and there’s nothing that can stop them except for one thing: American nuclear weapons. And that makes an anxious calculation, right? Because will America use those nuclear weapons to save countries far away? And they had to worry about that a lot, and it’s one of the reasons that Churchill was insistent, and the Labor government agreed that Britain should…
Develop its own nuclear weapons.
There’s a document in the Public Record Office produced every year until the end of Churchill’s premiership. But the document’s production of the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Department. This title was “The Likelihood of a General War with…”
The Soviet Union.
They just think that could happen, and NATO is formed in these years. And the Marshall Plan, which is aid to Europe from the United States, is launched, and that was very much to help Western Europe recover and get ready to defend itself.
So, that was the grim calculations that were going on at the time.
When Churchill goes to America, he gives a speech at the University of Miami.
It’s very good about education.
And then he goes to the White House on March 4th, and he and Truman ride down on the train. And when Churchill gave the speech, it begins in a humorous way. He says, “I’m a private citizen. There’s nothing here but what you see.” And if you look at a photograph of him giving that speech, what you see is him giving the speech, and just to his right sits the President of the United States. And that was like really, really artful. You know, it starts out the overall strategic conception.
Churchill says that with some humors.
His American generals like to say that, but of course, what he’s making fun of was a redundant phrase. And…
What is it that we’re aiming for?
And roughly, he says that that, to paraphrase, “Nothing less than the health and safety, the freedom and comfort of every home in every land around the world.” That’s a sweeping, huge…
Thing and a grand ambition.
And the rest of the speech, by the way, is a qualification on that. He defines his terms as he goes. The speech, actually, through the course of it, it narrows to a point. And the point is what he thinks is the most important point, which is the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain.
And you’re listening to Dr. Larry Arnn. A great job, as always, to Monte Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate. And there is nobody better to talk about such things, all things Churchill, than Dr. Arnn, the story of the Iron Curtain Speech. Here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories and our story on Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech. When we last left off, Churchill was explaining what exactly the West—that is, the free democracies—we’re aiming for. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Dr. Larry Arnn.
There isn’t any reason—science being what it is, he says—for the world not to enter a grand period of peace. But there are these two marauders, war and tyranny. And then he gives detailed plans what to…
Do about each of them.
And about war, his first solution is the United Nations. He’s a great believer in collective security. It’ll sound strange to American ears. We don’t really think of it as terribly important anymore. He thought that that the way you stop these tyrants with these modern, extremely dangerous weapons—something he learned in 1899 at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in North Africa—he watched the first machine guns, called Maxim guns, deployed by the British mow down an ara of a Dervish army, they were called, and take no casualties itself. Most everybody who saw that rejoiced at that. Churchill was horrified by it because he could just have had the imagination to think, “What if both sides have weapons like this?” And, of course, that dark vision came true in the First World War. So, if we could all ban together, wishing peace—because plenty is possible for everyone now, Churchill said—which I believe is very much the case today and indeed is being realized all over the world, then we can focus on that and we can live our lives and let people alone. But then the first cavea, when he’s talking about the United Nations, he says, “It has to have constabulary; it has to have force.” Then he says that it would be criminal madness to release the secrets of the nuclear bomb into the wide world at this stage, when it’s so divided. Only when we’ve realized, he says, “the brotherhood of man,” at some indeterminate future date, would that be a wise course. And then, for the first time in the speech, he introduces the differences in regimes or ways of people governing. And he says the nations that have the secret of the nuclear bomb—the United States, Britain, Canada…
They can be trusted with it because they…
Represent their people, and they won’t use it for ill. Whereas, if it gets into the hands of these nations that rule by force… And he doesn’t mention the Soviet Union, but he does later. But that’s what he means.
Then Lord knows what they’ll do with it. You know, soon the Soviet…
Union would have nuclear bomb, by the way, because they stole it from us through spies.
But he dreaded that day, and he thought…
In the meantime, that’s the thing—the only thing that can stop them. He’s thinking at large here because he wants to guarantee a future where we don’t destroy ourselves in these world wars anymore. And this is his plan to achieve them. It requires a massive adjustment because the Second World War was fought and won, in quantity terms, much more by the Soviet Union than anyone else. They had a simply enormous force. Of the Allies, I think they took four-fifths of the casualties—eighty percent.
There are great allies.
Because it would have been a different story without them. And then, for the first time in the speech, he introduces the expression “Iron Curtain.” Churchill had used the expression twice before in regard to the Soviet Union, but not in a place so famous. And he, by the way, titled the speech “The Sinews of Peace.” You know, sind us are wilt connect muscle to bone. But it became known as the “Iron Curtain Speech” because that was a dramatic thing to say, and it infuriated Stalin. From stetaty In in the Baltic to Triesque in the Adriatic. “An ion, the curtain has descended across the company,” he said, “from steat in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” So that means right across the middle of Europe, all the way, an Iron Curtain has descended upon Europe. And behind this Iron Curtain: the secret please, the regulation of previously private behavior—all of those things that are common to militarism.
So, militarism is the kind of government where it’s…
So thorough that they recruit your children to be spies upon you and people. In 1984, in that novel—but also in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany—their children are forced to go to a certain kind of school, and they’re taught terrible things. But, you know, little kids kind of like that because it’s like a big chance to grow up. And they’re taught that the family is unimportant, that the state provides everything, and they become spies on their parents. So that’s what’s behind the Iron Curtain. You know, it’s vicious and it’s thorough. It’s very difficult to get away from it. So that world—that’s the darkest world that has ever existed, tied with Nazi Germany and the worst periods in Chinese history. Churchill conceived the British Empire as an elaborate system of voluntary association. But for India, all of the major British colonies were self-governing. So, you know, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States—is an ally. Those were all countries that had their own government, and they contributed a little over forty-five percent of the British war effort in both World Wars. And Britain was unable to conscript a single soldier from any of those places. Churchill’s point all the time was, “This is an association of principle and love,” right? And the wars—both World Wars—would have been different without that love, which is all over the British Empire. You know, we regarded as a dirty word today, but it very much was not. So, the legacy of the speech: Churchill indicates a foreign policy built on a union of the free countries. This foreign policy would be defensive first, keep the Soviet Union and other tyrannical nations from dominating the world, and then it would exude a constant pressure toward freedom and justice everywhere in the world. But, he says in the important passage in this “Iron Curtain Speech,” he says, “It is not our duty to intervene in the affairs of nations that we have not conquered in war.”
And so this is a long…
Term strategy to solidify the free countries known as the West, and through that unity, to tear the Soviet Union.
And it’s a little bit like…
Lincoln’s strategy about straits about slavery. Lincoln and Churchill both regarded the slavery in American history and the slavery that was the Soviet Union…
The systems that won’t work.
Eventually, they’re going to collapse, which is, by the way, what happened to the Soviet Union, after two full generations of torturing people to death and distorting their lives and their minds and managing their families. After two generations of that, it collapsed of its own weight because it’s stupid, right? It’s not the way human beings should be governed. The classics teach us that tyrannies have a lot of trouble lasting a long time. And so Churchill thought, as he thought with Hitler, “Time is on our side.” We don’t have to undertake the disaster of trying to conquer them with their nuclear weapons and their massive armies. We’re just going to have to contain them, and that became the strategy: containment. And then get stronger ourselves and live our lives in freedom and exercise the maximum influence on them and everybody else in the world that we can. And that was the plan that was followed, and it ultimately worked. And we have not had a World War since the second, where, of course, collapsing into the dangerous idea that that can’t happen anymore, we ought to be aware that it can happen again, and we ought to be ready for it.
And you’ve been listening to Dr. Larry Arnn. A great job, as always, to Monte Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate. And there is nobody better to talk about such things, all things Churchill, than Dr. Arnn, the story of the Iron Curtain Speech. Here on Our American Stories.
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