The Curtain in the Gym
Next he spoke of two great dangers, war and tyranny, which disrupted the lives of ordinary people, and hoped the new United Nations Organization (which he called the UNO) would be helpful in the cause of peace. He spoke of what America's role would be in the Postwar world and what part its military would have play.
Up to that point, it had certainly been a good speech. Typical Churchill. But it was what he said next that earned tiny Fulton a place in history:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent."
The curtain, of course, was the influence of what Churchill called the Soviet Sphere, and he went on to list the cities that fell into its shadows. Prague. Berlin. Warsaw. Budapest. Vienna. (The Austrian capital was still under occupation at the time.) All the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe was how he put it. But it was his elegant imagery - the Iron Curtain - that stuck.
The phrase did not originate with Churchill, who in fact had used it earlier in correspondence with Truman and left it out of the prepared copies of his text delivered to the press. Surely he must have realized that the expression would make the evening news wires. If so, he was right. The press picked up on the phrase in a heartbeat, introducing it into - if not creating - the Cold War lexicon, where it remained until the final decades of the Twentieth Century. Even Churchill's official title for the speech, "The Sinews of Peace," has long been forgotten. It has been known as the "Iron Curtain Speech" ever since.
Visiting Fulton today is easy. Located approximately 20 miles north of Jefferson City in the middle of the state, it can easily be incorporated into a trip to St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, Lake of the Ozarks, even Branson. There are also a number of organized tours that visit the town.
You'll want to head for the campus of Westminster College, where there is a memorial to this great event, known officially as the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library. Dedicated in 1969, the memorial building is actually a church, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, which was designed by Christopher Wren. The church was disassembled stone by stone and was transported from England to the United States, where it was
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