Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech

Audience

Winston Churchill wrote his speeches with the expectation that they would be read and studied, similarly to how he had read and studied speeches as a young student at Harrow. Besides his audience at Westminster College, he clearly expected that other informed people would read his words and react to them. The Westminster College audience received Churchill's words with warm appreciation, interrupting him several times for applause. This made sense; they heard the tenor of the entire speech, which was far less focused on the coming diplomatic breakdown with the Soviet Union, and far more centered on the future of the United Nations and the continuation of the wartime alliance between the United States and Britain. However, the speech was mainly reported for its stunning notion that an “iron curtain” had settled over Europe just ten months after V-E (Victory in Europe) Day; as a result, initial commentary was mostly unfavorable. While members of Churchill's own political party, the Conservatives, hailed further evidence of their leader's genius, several Labour members of Parliament denounced the speech as warmongering. American newspapers scoffed at Churchill's notion that the wartime alliance with the Soviets had already broken down, and Stalin himself denounced the speech, even though he had made a similar one just weeks before. Only as public opinion changed and fear of Soviet expansionism grew would the speech be read as a prescient vision of the coming cold war—and even then it was due to a mere half-reading of its thesis.