Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the phrase "iron curtain", but when he inserted the expression in a speech at Westminster College in Fullerton, MO, he certainly made it famous. His words on March 5, 1946 were "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent."

Metaphorically demarcating the ideological barrier between communist and non-communist nations, the term was rarely employed before Churchill's Westminster College address. There is evidence of its existence as early as 1904 in an HG Wells story called Food of the Gods, in which is written "It became evident that Redwood had still imperfectly apprehended the fact that an iron curtain had dropped between him and the outer world."

The Oxford English Dictionary asserts this phrase, in its non-political incarnation, is at least 200 years old. An iron curtain in 18th century Europe was literally that: a curtain or sheet of iron in a theater engineered to drop to prevent the spread of fire throughout the auditorium. The Oxford English Dictionary contains a quotation in which the expression was so used circa 1794.

The modern political implication of the term relies on the image of an impenetrable barrier separating one area from another, as in the iron theater curtain segregating stage from audience.

Radio Script > Iron Curtain