People of a certain age are familiar with the phrase, “the iron curtain.” It was coined by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, a small town that houses Westminster College in the middle of middle America. In fact, it’s so ‘middle’ that Earl and I had difficulty finding it.
The College is home to the National Churchill Museum, a truly inspiring homage to Sr. Winston. It comprises the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, a museum dedicated to the life of Churchill, and a portion of the Berlin Wall that Sir Winston’s granddaughter brought to the grounds. This brief description pales in the presence of the real things.
Where to begin? Well, I’d say you have to experience it yourself, especially if you are of that age that remembers the phrase, “the iron curtain.” The exact sentence in which this is said goes like this: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent…”
Churchill led his beloved England through the penultimate war to victory. But after that he saw the dangers of the future in the way the former allies worked together. Or didn’t work together. Russia, in particular, swallowed entire countries and limited not only their communication with the West but also their independent development. This is what Churchill meant by defining those countries as being behind an iron curtain.
That was more than sixty years ago, and the world has changed several times over since then. Churchill died in 1965 at the age of ninety-one without seeing the end to the iron curtain. But eventually, it came down as symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He would have been pleased.
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