Fulton, Missouri, was the setting for Winston Churchill’s March 5, 1946, speech on the growing Soviet reach in Eastern Europe. Harry Truman helped bring Churchill to the town’s Westminster College and introduced him there; the speech’s reception turned this small Missouri community into the backdrop for a consequential moment in the emerging debate over relations with the Soviet Union.

Setting and Invitation

Located twenty miles north of Jefferson City amid rolling farmland, Fulton was a small town with a college at its center. Westminster College was a Presbyterian men’s school, and its president, Dr. Franc L. McCluer, conceived the invitation to Churchill. McCluer traveled to Washington to consult Harry Vaughan, who had played center on the college football team and brought him to meet Truman. Truman responded enthusiastically, writing on the invitation that Westminster was a wonderful school in his home state and that he hoped Churchill could come; Truman offered to introduce him.

Churchill welcomed Truman’s sponsorship, replying that anything he said under Truman’s auspices would command attention. Their conversations about the address continued before the visit. Churchill described its subject as the need for full military collaboration between Britain and the United States to preserve peace. On March 5, as the train carrying the party moved along the Missouri River, Churchill made final revisions. Truman had read the speech and told him it would do nothing but good and would make a stir.

The Town and the Ceremony

The welcome in Fulton matched Truman’s affection for the Missouri setting. The day was sunny and in the high sixties; the town had been spruced up, and thousands gathered, many arriving from nearby countryside. As the motorcade traveled down the red-brick main street, elderly men in high-topped shoes and carrying canes waved colored balloons from a street corner, while sailors stood behind them. The scene presented a small-town audience and a familiar local landscape around an address with international stakes.

Westminster’s campus was decorated with British and American flags. After lunch at McCluer’s home, an academic procession made its way to the gymnasium, where Churchill stood out in Oxford robes and cap. Introducing him, Truman recalled that he had met both Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam and had become fond of both. He praised Churchill as one of the outstanding men of the ages and said he expected him to offer something constructive to the world.

The Speech and Its Reception

Churchill began by recognizing the unusual honor of being introduced to an academic audience by the American president. He praised the Russian people and Stalin, welcomed Russia among the leading nations, and called for growing contact between Russians and people across the Atlantic. He then turned to what he described as the facts of Soviet influence and control in Central and Eastern Europe, giving dramatic force to the image of an “iron curtain” descending across the continent. He argued for a union of Western democracies, especially Britain and the United States, as a response to Soviet power.

Truman’s applause and expression made his approval apparent in the hall, but the reaction beyond Fulton was sharply divided against the occasion. Editorials accused Churchill of worsening relations with Russia; The Nation criticized Truman for associating himself with the event, and Walter Lippmann called the speech an almost catastrophic blunder. Stalin characterized it as a call to war. The town had hosted a speech whose local ceremony could not contain its international consequences.

Truman’s Retreat from the Occasion

Stunned by the criticism, Truman returned to Washington and told reporters he had not known what Churchill would say, although the account makes clear that he had read the speech in advance and approved of it. He likewise told Henry Wallace that he had not seen it beforehand and that Churchill had put him on the spot, then declined to comment when asked for his considered view. To placate Stalin, Truman offered to send the Missouri to bring him to the United States and accompany him to the University of Missouri so Stalin could speak as Churchill had. Stalin declined. Fulton thus remained both the place Truman had chosen to welcome Churchill and the setting whose political aftermath he tried to disclaim.