Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri is, by most accounts, a small and quiet liberal arts college. Tidy limestone buildings rise modestly from the rolling mid-Missouri hills, and the student body rarely breaches a thousand. Yet, in March of 1946, the eyes of the world turned to this quiet campus. What happened that day would shape the vocabulary of the Cold War and signal the beginning of a new global order.
But let’s begin earlier.
Founded in 1851 by Presbyterians, Westminster College was named with lofty ambition, hoping to evoke the intellectual prestige of its namesake in London. The college endured the Civil War, saw enrollment dip and swell through the 19th century, and educated young men—mostly white, mostly local—in classics, theology, and the moral sciences. Over time, its character grew more progressive and more global, but even by the mid-20th century it remained an out-of-the-way place, better known regionally than nationally.
That changed in a single afternoon in 1946.
It was President Harry S. Truman who extended the invitation. A proud Missourian, Truman had a simple idea: bring one of the 20th century’s greatest statesmen to the American heartland. Winston Churchill, recently turned out of office after leading Britain through World War II, was now a private citizen—but hardly a silent one. Truman invited Churchill to speak at Westminster College, calling it “a place where you can talk with the kind of frankness you used to use in the House of Commons.”
Churchill accepted.
On March 5, 1946, Churchill arrived in Fulton by train, accompanied by President Truman. The small town buzzed with anticipation. The gymnasium was packed. National press crowded every available space. Churchill, standing at a podium before an enormous American flag, delivered what he titled “The Sinews of Peace.”
The world remembers it by a different name: “The Iron Curtain Speech.”
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
With that phrase, Churchill diagnosed the new world order. The Soviet Union, he warned, was establishing a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe. The wartime alliance was over. The peace would be cold. Some in the audience bristled. Stalin called Churchill a warmonger. But history would prove Churchill prescient. The speech marked the rhetorical beginning of the Cold War.
In 1969, Westminster College established the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury on campus—a 17th-century Christopher Wren church, bombed during the Blitz and later relocated brick by brick from London to Fulton. It stands now as a chapel and memorial, both to British-American friendship and to Churchill’s speech.
Even more haunting is the “Breakthrough” sculpture, built from eight segments of the actual Berlin Wall. Erected in 1990 after the fall of the Wall, the sculpture by artist Edwina Sandys (Churchill’s granddaughter) sits on campus as a striking epilogue to her grandfather’s warning. He had spoken of a curtain descending; forty-four years later, that curtain was lifted.
People still ask: why Fulton? Why not Harvard or Oxford or Washington, D.C.?
Because Truman understood symbolism. By placing Churchill in Fulton, he brought world affairs to Middle America. It was a way of telling Americans that the postwar struggle would not be confined to Europe. The Iron Curtain would shape life in Missouri just as surely as it would in Berlin.
And Churchill, ever the lover of theater, knew a good stage when he saw one.
Today, students walk past the church, the sculpture, and the flags that mark Westminster’s unique role in world history. Few colleges of its size can claim they hosted a speech that helped usher in an entire geopolitical era.
A little gym. A big speech. And a curtain of iron that never quite touched the town—but left its shadow nonetheless.