Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech
On this day · 5 March 1946
A recently ousted prime minister stood in a small Missouri gym and named the divide that would define the next half-century.
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill rose in the gymnasium of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and delivered an address he titled “The Sinews of Peace.” History remembers it by a different phrase.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Churchill warned that Soviet power and influence had sealed off the nations of central and eastern Europe behind that barrier. He urged a “special relationship” between Britain and the United States to stand against it — coining a term still used today.
The setting was unlikely. Churchill was no longer prime minister, having lost the 1945 election, and spoke as a private citizen. President Harry Truman, a Missouri native, sat beside him and had personally added a note to the college’s invitation. Many commentators date the rhetorical opening of the Cold War to that afternoon in a Midwestern town of a few thousand people.
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