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Clarence K. Streit was born in California, Missouri, in 1896. At the age of 15 he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he founded the Konah, a high school paper that is now one of the oldest in continuous publication. Streit worked in the summers surveying in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains to finance his education at Montana State University, (now The University of Montana-Missoula), where he edited the college newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, and served on the debate team.

Streit left Missoula in 1917 and volunteered in the 18 th Railway Engineers for war service. One of the first 50,000 American soldiers to land in Europe, he reached France in August of 1917. In 1918 he joined the Intelligence Service where for a time he served as one of the guards of President Wilson. After his time in the service, Streit returned to Missoula where he won a Rhodes Scholarship which enabled him to study history at Oxford. Once in England, Streit met Jeanne Defrance of Paris, and they married in 1921.

In 1925 he joined the New York Times as a foreign correspondent and in 1929 went to Geneva as a correspondent for the League of Nations, a post he held for nearly ten years. During his time as a journalist, Streit covered such prominent issues as the Sino-Japanese war, the depression and the rise of Nazi dictatorship. His interest in such international issues led Streit to resign his position at the Times in 1939 and publish his first book, Union Now, an appeal for a federal union of the democracies.

After the success of Union Now, which admirers hailed as democracy's answer to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Clarence and Jeanne Streit continued to commit their lives to the cause of union. In 1940, the couple founded Federal Union, Inc., an educational organization committed to universal world government. Chapters opened in towns all over the nation, including the formation of a Missoula chapter in 1940. Streit served as president of Federal Union as well as editor of Freedom and Union, the organization's magazine. Streit was one of the founding members of the Atlantic Union Committee that merged with other organizations in 1962 to form the Atlantic Council. His works on behalf of world peace earned Streit a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Clarence Streit died in 1986.