How Winston Churchill Shaped the Cold War From a Small Missouri College

On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at a small Missouri college. The Cold War had barely begun, yet this moment defined the coming conflict and gave the world one of history’s most enduring phrases. Dr. Larry Arnn explains how a speech few expected to matter became one of Churchill’s most important legacies.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including your story. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites and one of our favorite
subjects to cover on this show are stories about American
history and history in general. And all of our history
stories are brought to us by the great folks at

(00:29):
Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't get
to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu. Speaking
of which, up next a history story from Hillsdale College
President Larry arn on a perilous time in world history.

(00:52):
After World War Two, 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

(01:14):
Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. After being
invited to speak there at a low point in his career.
Here's doctor Larry Arne with a story of the Iron
Curtain speech.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
It was a world changing fact when he got this invitation,
and he came in at a low moment for him.
The July fifth, nineteen forty five 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,

(01:50):
and come and give a talk. And there's a ps
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.

(02:15):
Churchill gets there the day before March the fourth, nineteen
forty six. 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

(02:36):
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

(02:57):
fell in love with him and brought him into the government,
and he became 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

(03:17):
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

(03:38):
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

(03:58):
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

(04:19):
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

(04:42):
in the Public Record Office produced every year until the
end of Churchill's premiership. But the documented's production of the
Foreign Ministry and the Defense Department. Its title was the
likelihood of a general war with the Soviet Union. They
just think that could happen, and you NATO is formed
in these years, and the Marshall Plan, which is aid

(05:04):
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

(05:28):
the White House on the fourth of March 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,

(05:50):
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 general is 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?

(06:12):
And roughly he says the 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

(06:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
And you're listening to doctor Lowry or and tell the
story of the Iron Curtain speech in Doctor arn in
addition to being the president of Hillsdale College, is one
of the world's foremost experts on Sir Winston Churchill. When
we come back more with doctor Larry arn here on
our American Stories, Leehabib here, as we approach our nation's

(07:31):
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I'd like to remind you
that all the history stories you hear on this show
are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
And Hillsdale isn't just a great school for your kids
or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to find out about their terrific
free online courses. Their series on communism is one of
the finest I've ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale dot

(07:55):
edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses.
And we returned to our American stories and our story
on Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. When we last left off,

(08:17):
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 doctor Lori arm.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
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

(08:49):
United Nations. He's a great believer in collective security. It'll
sound strange to American years, we don't really think of
it as terribly important anymore. He thought then that the
way you stop these tyrants with these modern, extremely dangerous weapons,
something he learned in eighteen ninety nine at the Battle
of Omdurmann in the Sudan in North Africa, he watched

(09:12):
the first machine guns called maxim times deployed by the
British mow down an Arab 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 had the imagination to think, what
if both sides have weapons like this? And of course

(09:34):
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

(09:56):
people alone. But then the first caveat comes 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,

(10:19):
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,

(10:39):
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 the nuclear bomb, by the way,

(11:01):
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 him. He's
thinking at large here because he wants to guarantee a
future where we don't destroy ourselves in these world wars anymore.

(11:21):
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

(11:42):
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

(12:04):
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 stetty In in
the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. An ion, the
curtain has descended across the company, he said, from Stead

(12:27):
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 solitarianism. Solitarism

(12:50):
is that kind of government where it's so thorough that
they recruit your children to be spies upon you and people.
In nineteen eighty four, in that novel, but also in
the Soviet Union. In Nazi Germany, their children are forced
to go to school, certain kind of school, and they're
taught terrible things. But you know, little kids kind of

(13:13):
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

(13:36):
has ever existed, tied with Nazi Germany and the worst
periods in Chinese history. Church Will conceive the British Empire
as a elaborate system of voluntary association. But for India,
all of the major British colonies were self governing. Oh

(14:00):
you know, South Africa, Australia and 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

(14:22):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:15):
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

(15:39):
bit like lincoln 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 iterations

(16:01):
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

(16:22):
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

(16:46):
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, lapsing 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.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
And you've been listening to doctor Larry are in 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 Arn the story
of the Iron Curtain speech. Here on our American story.