Winston Churchill Did Not Coin the Phrase ‘Iron Curtain’

Exactly 69 years ago, on Mar. 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stood in a college gymnasium in Fulton, Mo., at the beginning of the Cold War, while President Harry S. Truman sat behind him in a gown and mortarboard. Speaking to students gathered at Westminster College, he accepted an honorary degree and famously condemned the Soviet Union’s ways: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

The actual title of Churchill’s speech was “Sinews of Peace,” though most people know it as the “Iron Curtain speech.” Over the years there has been another twist of the record. Churchill often gets credit for coining that metallic metaphor—on that stage—for the figurative barrier drawn across Europe between the capitalist West and the communist East. But he did not. In fact, there’s evidence of the phrase being used to mean exactly that a good 26 years earlier when an E. Snowden (seriously) published a travelogue about her adventures in Bolshevik Russia.

So why do quotes get false histories? Lots of reasons.