Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, prides itself on being a small college that has a big impact. Never have those words rung truer than when Winston Churchill arrived on its campus in the spring of 1946. At the time, the world was still reeling from the devastation of World War II. Nations lay in ruins, while fragile wartime alliances were stretched to the breaking point. The words he spoke on March 5, 1946, not only warned of the dangers that lay ahead for the democratic nations of the world, it laid the foundations for the postwar global order.
Churchill identified the threats facing the West in his speech, titled “The Sinews of Peace,” that day. He cautioned of the “expansive and proselytizing tendencies” of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Despite being an ally of both the United States and Great Britain during World War lI, Churchill saw the Soviet Union’s actions in imposing control over the eastern European nations which lay behind the “Iron Curtain” as an example of a desire for an “indefinite expansion of … [its] power and doctrines.”
This was a call for the United States and Great Britain to face up to this challenge. In issuing his rallying cry, Churchill outlined several solutions aimed at both preventing future wars and at safeguarding the world against the rise of tyrannical regimes. In doing so, he articulated several ideas which were not only relevant for the time but also may offer guidance for navigating what he described as “anxious and baffling times.”
The first of these is the need for robust leadership and cooperation among democratic nations. Specifically, he called for stronger ties between a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples,” led by the British Empire and the United States to oppose the spread of despotism. To do this, he envisioned “the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases” and even looked forward to a time of “common citizenship.” He also called on the recently formed United Nations to be a robust institution capable of preventing future wars with their own “international armed force.”
Churchill also spoke of the need for vigilance and action against forces which sought to undermine democratic institutions. He spoke directly to the American people, claiming that their postwar position of geopolitical preeminence bestowed upon them an “awe-inspiring accountability to the future” in meeting the challenges of the time. He cautioned that the U.N. must be “a force for action,” and not a place for “a frothing of words!” Looking back at his own interwar experience, when his warnings about the rise of Nazism went largely unheeded, he proclaimed, “there never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.” He did not want the hard-learned lessons of unchecked aggression to be ignored.
To oppose authoritarian regimes, Churchill extolled democratic nations to ensure that they were living up to their own ideals. Specifically, he emphasized the preeminence of the Enlightenment values of individual liberties, representative government, and the rule of law. Unlike democratic regimes, he noted, in authoritarian states, “control is enforced upon the common people by various kinds of all-embracing police governments to a degree which is overwhelming and contrary to every principle of democracy.” Popular representation is lost when the “power of the State is exercised without restraint, either by dictators or by compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police.”
The threat of such authoritarian tendencies, he noted, violates the most cherished principles enshrined in the “Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law, and which “find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.”
Foundational to the principles of a free society are “free unfettered elections, with secret ballot, to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell; that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom.” If the United States and Great Britain were to remain a force for good, he opined, “Let us preach what we practice — let us practice what we preach.”
Churchill’s speech was not without controversy. It was denounced by Stalin as imperialist warmongering propaganda, while war-weary critics in the United States and in Great Britain feared that his denouncement of the Soviets might usher in a new and even more catastrophic conflict. Others pointed out the contradictions inherent in Churchill’s calls for self-determination at a time when Britain doggedly clung to the last remnants of its empire, while some bristled at the exclusionary implications of the term “English-speaking peoples.”
But today, the global postwar order which Churchill’s speech helped usher in is becoming increasingly strained by the rise of authoritarian regimes and a retreat from international collaboration on global issues. Churchill’s calls for cooperation and vigilance in promoting the democratic values that are the enemies of both war and tyranny are well worth remembering. Eighty years later, his words still contain important lessons for our present “anxious and baffling times.”
Mark Boulton, PhD, FRHistS, is chair of the History and Museum Studies Department at Westminster College and co-editor of Red Reckoning: The Cold War and the Transformation of American Life (LSU: 2023) with Dr. Tobias Gibson.
