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Articles
Winston Churchill and the Etymology of “Iron Curtain”
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | January 19, 2023
- Category: Churchill in the Nuclear Age Q & A The Literary Churchill
Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”1
From whence the iron curtain?
We are asked where Winston Churchill derived “iron curtain,” the phrase he made world famous at Fulton. Was it as prosaic as the iron curtain in 19th century theaters, drawn to protect the audience from stage fires? Or as exotic as the writings of his contemporaries, H.G. Wells or Ethel Snowden? Or did Churchill read the Talmud?
Bill Mitchell, the colorful head of General Motors Styling from 1956 to 1977, was asked if his colleagues stole the distinctive bustle-back styling of the 1983 Cadillac Seville from Mercedes-Benz. “Certainly not,” he snorted, “They stole it from Rolls-Royce. If you’re gonna steal, rob a bank, not a grocery store.”
In Churchill’s case, the evidence suggests that he robbed a grocery store for a phrase that quickly became his, © Fulton, 1946. But the many references to the two words make for an interesting line of enquiry. It shows (to our surprise) that Churchill used the term at least six times before he arrived to shock the world in Missouri.
Early antecedents
Dr. Manfred Weidhorn, the dean of scholars on the literary Churchill, tracked the phrase through millennia. He cites it in books published in 1923, 1918, 1915 and 1904. The last was The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells, whose works Churchill devoured. “It is also found in the Jewish liturgy and in the Talmud.”2
The first reference to an iron curtain in the Soviet context was by Viscountess Ethel Snowden. In 1920, she joined a Labour Party fact-finding delegation that toured Russia. Arriving in Petrograd in May, she wrote, “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”3
Oceans apart politically, Churchill admired Ethel, and her husband, the redoubtable Philip. Writing in 1924 he praised Ethel’s frank appraisal of Communism:
The Bolsheviks had shown her everything that they considered typified the new régime and order of society. In addition she had prowled about on her own. She had thus noted a certain number of items which did not appear on the official programme. In a cool, searching, horribly veracious narrative she had recounted her impressions of Russia under the Soviets.
Men are often visionaries; women are nearly always practical. Mrs. Snowden was not only practical but fearless. She saw all she could; she judged all she saw by a strict rule of thumb; she set it all down in the cold lead of a small book. She hit the Bolsheviks and all that they stood for plumb on the nose. The fact that she was a British Socialist, with a lifelong record of fidelity to Party principles and, it must be added, of general social service, made her testimony all the more offensive.4
Clearly, Churchill read Snowden, and might have stored her phrase in his capacious memory.
German precedents
Manfred Weidhorn wrote that Eden had used the term “steel curtain” to describe all the dictator states in 1937.5 Then, as the German Reich was expiring in 1945, two Nazis employed Snowden’s phrase to warn of Soviet intentions. The first was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief:
Should the German people lay down their arms, the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin would allow the Soviets to occupy all Eastern and Southeastern Europe together with the major part of the Reich. An iron curtain would at once descend on this territory which, including the Soviet Union, would be of enormous dimensions.6
“It might seem strange that Churchill’s phrase was preceded one of his bitterest enemies,” wrote Dalton Newfield. It probably signified Goebbels’ preference for making peace with the Anglo-Americans before the Soviets. “Yet Goebbels, himself no slight student of politics and global strategy, was probably as capable as Churchill in recognizing the ruthless ambitions of Stalin—perhaps more so, for the tyrant is well qualified to recognize his fellow tyrant.”7
Another Nazi use of iron curtain surfaced only days after Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide in their Berlin bunker. It came in a May 2nd broadcast by the German Foreign Minister, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, reported the next day in The Times. “In the East,” von Krosigk told his listeners, “the iron curtain, behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward.”8
Churchill’s usage
Combing Churchill’s archive, we found six occurrences of the phrase before he made it famous at Fulton. On V-E Day, 8 May 1945, he worried whether “an iron curtain is to be drawn down between us, and only occasionally raised to allow a face, and not a very pleasant face at that, to peer through at us?”9 Four days later he made the phrase official, in telegram to President Truman about the Russians:
An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the region Lubeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands. [Following American withdrawal] a broad band of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland.… It would be open to the Russians in a very short time to advance, if they chose, to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.10
A concerned Truman sent the pro-Soviet diplomat Joseph E. Davies to London to consult with (and possibly to assuage) the Prime Minister. Undeterred, Churchill told Davies that the Russians
had clamped down a “steel curtain” across eastern Europe, and they posed a great danger throughout western Europe. The Prime Minister had referred to an “iron curtain” in the past; he would pick up and abandon catch phrases in the months ahead—lapsing into the weak image of an “iron fence” on one occasion—until he finally settled on the chilling words “iron curtain” and repeated them until all his Western friends saw the world in his image.11
Potsdam and Stalin
The Potsdam “Big Three” conference began on July 17th, despite Churchill’s desire it convene earlier—when again he mentioned the iron curtain to Truman:
I am sure you understand the reason why I am anxious for an earlier date, say the 3rd or 4th. I view with profound misgivings the retreat of the American Army to our line of occupation in the central sector, thus bringing Soviet power into the heart of Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward. I hoped that this retreat, if it has to be made, would be accompanied by the settlement of many great things which would be the true foundation of peace.12
At Potsdam a week later, Churchill flung the fateful term at Stalin himself. According to the transcript, he compared Britain’s situation in Romania and Bulgaria with Russia’s “unrestricted access” to the political process in Italy. Stalin, he said, “would be astonished to read the catalogue of incidents to our missions in Bucharest and Sofia. They were not free to go abroad. An iron curtain had been rung down.” Stalin said these were “fairy tales.”13
Potsdam adjourned for Churchill and Attlee to return home for the British election returns. Attlee alone returned, Britain’s new prime minister. In opposition, Churchill reiterated the now-familiar phrase to Parliament on August 16th: “…it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”14
The stage was now set for Fulton. Churchill had referred to the Iron Curtain six times before he proclaimed it there: thrice to Truman or his representative, once each to his secretary, Stalin and Parliament. The last made it public, and other voices took it up. In October, Thomas St. Vincent Troubridge wrote: “There is an iron curtain across Europe.”15
Where did Churchill get it?
Mr. Richard Mahoney, in a new edition of his book of aphorisms, The Quotable Winston Churchill, believes in the most prosaic root of Churchill’s phrase: the iron safety curtain “first used in the Theater Royal in Drury Lane in 1794 to protect patrons from stage-generated fires.”16 And Churchill himself seems to have agreed, according to the Churchill Archives Centre:
In 1951 Churchill received a letter from one of the compilers of the American College Dictionary, asking him whether he recalled having met the phrase before his first use of it. Churchill’s response was, “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before—though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theater.” 17
Similarly around the same time, Churchill replied to another quotation query, denying the famous “bring a friend, if you have one” exchange with Bernard Shaw. If we are to accept the one stated view, we must also accept the other.
Some might argue that Churchill by 1951 was not remembering some pertinent contemporary source of the term he began using in 1945, like von Krosigk’s May 2nd broadcast. (After all, he read The Times, thoroughly.) But Richard Mahoney disagrees:
Certainly he decided to co-opt it for himself. He certainly used it frequently after 1945, and never credited Snowden, or Germans, even English theater. It is logical to assume he knew that after Fulton, he would be remembered as the coiner of “iron curtain.” So I will stay with Occam’s Razor principle: The simplest explanation trumps the complicated. If you hear hoofbeats, think “horse,” not “zebra.”18
Endnotes and further reading
1 Winston S. Churchill, Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., 5 March 1946, in The Sinews of Peace (London: Cassell, 1948), 100.
2 Manfred Weidhorn, Churchill’s Rhetoric and Political Discourse (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 131 n.5.
3 Ethel Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (London: Cassell, 1920; Wentworth Press Classic Reprint, 2016), 32.
4 Churchill, “Mr. Snowden’s Horoscope,” in The Weekly Dispatch, 10 August 1924, reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), 4 vols., II: 144.
5 Weidhorn, Churchill’s Rhetoric, 131 n.5
6 Joseph Goebbels in Das Reich, 25 February 1945 (translated from the German).
7 Dalton Newfield in Finest Hour 19, May-June 1971, 5.
8 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 7.
9 Elizabeth Nel, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1958), 178.
10 Churchill to Truman on 12 May 1945, in Gilbert, Never Despair, 7.
11 Charles L. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (London: Evans, 1975), 33-35.
12 Prime Minister to President Truman 4 June 45 in Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), 524-25.
13 Gilbert, Never Despair, 3.
14 “The Supreme Triumph,” House of Commons, 16 August 1945, in Churchill, Victory (London: Cassell, 1946), 232.
15 Thomas St. Vincent Troubridge, Sunday Empire News, 21 October 1945, cited by Newfield in Finest Hour 19, 5.
16 Richard Mahoney, The Quotable Winston Churchill (second edition, Fulton, Mo.: America’s National Churchill Museum, 2002), xii. Commendably, this edition strives to comb out the apocryphal and untrue from the first edition. That’s quite unlike most quote books, which continue to spew the fake quotations in reprint after reprint. Proceeds support the National Churchill Museum at Fulton. Interested readers should order copies from them, not Amazon, because Amazon is still selling new and used copies of the original edition.
17 Natalie Adams to the author, 15 April 1999, citing Churchill Archives Centre CHUR 2/391.
18 Richard Mahoney to the author, 20 September 20022
You are too generous in your recognition and plug for my book. Once I learned the phrase Occam’s Razor many years ago in a Statistics class required of chemistry majors like me, I labored to work it into sentences. And here, all these years later, you have done it masterfully well on my behalf. I urge readers to get “the real thing” your comprehensive quotations book Churchill by Himself. Why not have a zebra instead of my poor plain horse?
–
Thanks for the kind words. -RML