Historians agree on who put the phrase “Iron Curtain” at the center of Cold War vocabulary: Winston Churchill, in his March 5, 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, broadcast on American radio and reprinted worldwide. The image, though, had a longer life behind it. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had used it in 1939, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels had turned it against the Soviets in February 1945, and Churchill himself had written it to President Truman in May 1945. The Fulton speech was the moment the metaphor became the controlling image of the Cold War.
Earlier Uses of the Image
The metaphor of an iron curtain as a barrier separating peoples goes back to the theater, where the safety curtain that prevented fires from spreading was often iron. By the early twentieth century, the phrase had taken on political meaning in European journalism.
In May 1939, the Soviet government issued a statement protesting what it called Western efforts to erect “an iron curtain” between the USSR and its neighbors. The exact phrase “iron curtain” appeared in Soviet diplomatic language. After the German invasion of June 1941, the phrase disappeared from official Soviet usage, since Moscow was now allied with the democracies.
Joseph Goebbels used the image on February 25, 1945, in a Das Reich article describing what would happen if the Red Army overran Germany. The Soviets would erect, he wrote, “an iron curtain” behind which “the peoples of the East” would be liquidated.
Churchill’s Correspondence with Truman
Churchill used the phrase in a long letter to Truman on May 11, 1945, four days after V-E Day. He wrote of “an iron curtain” descending across the European continent. The phrasing suggests he was consciously appropriating a familiar image. The letter was not published at the time, but it laid the conceptual foundation for what Churchill would say publicly ten months later.
Churchill had lost the general election in late July 1945 and was out of office. As a private citizen, he had unusual freedom to frame his warnings as he wished. His American lecture tour in early 1946 took him to several cities. Truman — himself a Missourian — agreed to introduce the speech at Westminster College in Fulton, where Truman had grown up.
The Fulton Speech
The speech ran to roughly 4,000 words. Its central section, immediately after a long defense of the United Nations and a warning about the risks of an Anglo-American rift, contained the now-famous passage on the iron curtain. Churchill then laid out a proposal for a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples” — a vision that would mature into the Truman-era Anglo-American special relationship.
The speech was carried live by CBS Radio. Within days, “iron curtain” was being used in headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Stalin responded in Pravda on March 13, 1946, accusing Churchill of warmongering and of wishing to revive the language of anti-Soviet “Zionism.” The exchange, in the metaphor’s own ironic logic, made the curtain more visible than Churchill’s speech alone could have done.
For the broader context that gave the phrase its power, see the Cold War’s origins and major phases.