Clarence Streit

Who was Clarence Streit?

Clarence Kirschmann Streit was a journalist and Atlanticist who played a prominent role in the Atlantic Movement.

Streit, of Palatine German origin, moved with his family to Missoula, Montana in 1911. In Missoula, he founded the Konah, a high school paper that is now one of the oldest in the United States in continuous publication. While a student at Montana State University, he volunteered for military service during World War I, serving in an Intelligence unit in France and assisting the American delegation at the Conference of Versailles. He was a Rhodes scholar at University of Oxford in 1920. He married Jeanne Defrance in Paris in 1921, after which he became a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

In 1929, he was assigned to cover the League of Nations in Switzerland, where he witnessed the League's slow disintegration and collapse. That experience, coupled with the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe, convinced him that mankind's best hope was a federal union of democracies, modeled on American federalism. This led him to write Union Now, a book advocating the political integration of the democracies of Western Europe and the other English-speaking countries at that time. The book was published in 1938, on the eve of World War II. It had sold over 300,000 copies by 1972.