Background
Streit was born in California, Missouri, the son of Emma (Kirschman) and Louis Leland Streit.
Streit was born in California, Missouri, the son of Emma (Kirschman) and Louis Leland Streit.
Of Palatine German origin, he 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 (now the University of Montana), 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.
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 (including their colonies) and the other English-speaking countries at that time (the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). The book was published in 1938, on the eve of World World War World War II lieutenant had sold over 300,000 copies by 1972.
Soon after the book"s publication, Streit founded Federal Union, Incorporated.
(later renamed the Association to Unite the Democracies) to promote his vision. In 1949, with William Clayton and Owen Roberts, Streit founded the Atlantic Union Committee, advocating the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) into a political entity. The Streit Council, a successor organization to the Association to Unite the Democracies, was named after him.
