Clarence Streit
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Clarence Kirschmann Streit (name rhymes with "fight") (January 21, 1896 California, Missouri - July 6, 1986 Washington, D.C.) was an Atlantic federalist who wrote Union Now in 1939, a proposal to unite the democratic nations of the world under a federation as a nucleus of world order. The book, first published in 1938, sold over 300,000 copies.
Streit, of Palatine German origin, moved with his family to Missoula, Montana in 1911. He volunteered for military service during World War I, after which he was a member of the American delegation at the Conference of Versailles. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1920. He married Jeanne Defrance in Paris in 1921. In 1929, he became the New York Times' correspondent at the League of Nations, and witnessed its slow disintegration and collapse. That experience, coupled with the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe, led to his belief that mankind's best hope was a federal union of free peoples, based on the principles of the Constitution of the United States.
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, he wrote Union Now, which advocated a federal union consisting of the English-speaking nations of the world at that time. In 1949, with William Clayton and Owen Roberts, Streit founded the Atlantic Union Committee, advocating the reform of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) according to principles of federalist democracy. In 1962, Streit advocated the creation of a true Atlantic federation of the democracies, with the eventual goal of world federation. To that end he founded the Association to Unite the Democracies (AUD). The Streit Council for a Union of Democracies, a successor organization to AUD, was named after him.
