March 5, 1946 – Winston Churchill Gives His “Iron Curtain Speech”

After World War II, Sir Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, came to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to receive an honorary degree. Afterwards, he gave a speech in which he used the phrase “Iron Curtain” to describe the division between the West and the areas controlled by the Soviet Union.

As “Time Magazine” reports:

Churchill often gets credit for coining that metallic metaphor—on that stage—for the figurative barrier drawn across Europe between the capitalist West and the communist East. But he did not. In fact, there’s evidence of the phrase being used to mean exactly that a good 26 years earlier when an E. Snowden (seriously) published a travelogue about her adventures in Bolshevik Russia.”

In any event, Churchill certainly popularized the phrase, with his gift for rhetoric combined with the political appeal of his sentiments. He observed:

It is my duty … to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen, requires a unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung.”

You can read this famous speech in its entirety here. (Somewhat ironically, this same date in 1953 marks the death of Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee.)

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers a speech at Westminster College that addressed the Communist threat, and in which he uttered the now-famous phrase ‘Iron Curtain,’ Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946. (Photo by George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)