Chapter 5 concentrates on Streit’s efforts as a political lobbyist, primarily with the Atlantic Union Committee (AUC), a Washington lobby group and vocal proponent of Atlanticism during the 1950s and into the 1960s. If Streit’s federal union project represented one version of Atlanticism, the AUC’s extended give-and-take with Congress acted as a midwife to the emergence in the early 1960s of an opposing version. Imagined as a community of transatlantic elites centered in and on the United States, this Atlanticism continues to dominate Washington politics today.

Chapter 3 examines Streit’s wartime activities on behalf of Federal Union, which included efforts to build a national movement with local chapters. The difficulties encountered offer another perspective on grassroots political mobilization, one that calls into question arguments that surge local activism at the time. The chapter also considers Streit’s involvement with the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace (CSOP), a semi-official grouping that played a key role in designing and championing the UNO as a pillar of postwar US internationalism. Streit’s unwillingness to collaborate meaningfully with the CSOP left him with inadequate means either to promote his own project or to counter the appropriation of federalism for other ends.

This chapter focuses on Union Now, Streit’s first and best-known book, published in 1939, spotlighting the interaction of two factors to explain its visibility on. One factor is Streit’s energetic promotional campaign. Streit proved remarkably resourceful in attracting attention, exploiting the possibilities offered by newspapers, radio, public lectures, and the emerging practice of celebrity endorsements. The chapter highlights Streit’s first promotional strategy, that of courting a select group of opinion-makers, through case studies of several influential figures: Henry Luce, John Foster Dulles, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Thompson, and Russell Davenport. The second factor is the cult of the US Constitution and its federal system during the interwar years but which began in the post-Civil War period. This cult provided fertile ground for Streit’s Atlantic federal union project modeled on the US Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Springfield, IL)

Writing to a British acquaintance in March 1951, Walter Lippmann, then at the height of his fame as a foreign affairs commentator, described Clarence Streit as “an old friend” who “has built his whole crusade on an hysterical illusion” – that the federal union of the thirteen American states forged in Philadelphia in 1787 offered a model for the countries of the North Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century. “I regard the campaign as on the whole well-meaning,” Lippmann explained in regard to Streit’s activities, “but very misguided. Its effect is to miseducate rather than to educate American opinion, at least. But I never attack it or criticize it publicly because there are so many worse things abroad.”1

Chapter 4 centers on his educational activism, whose principal vehicle was Federal Union, an organization founded during the war, and which in 1946 launched a monthly magazine, Freedom & Union, to stimulate discussion of Atlantic federal union and of federalist frameworks more generally. Political and financial considerations prodded Streit to champion abstract principles of democracy, freedom, and liberty, which further Americanized his project by rooting it in dominant Cold War ideological paradigms while also eliding differences between the United States and Western European countries.

Chapter 1 considers Streit’s early years. It begins with his path from an ambitious high school and university student in Montana to Europe: as soldier in World War I, as a low-level member of the US delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, as a Rhodes scholar, and finally as a budding journalist. It then examines his emergence as a well-regarded foreign correspondent during the 1920s, a period often presented as the profession’s golden age. Although Streit lacked the glamor of better-known celebrity colleagues, his experiences offer another perspective on the work of interwar foreign correspondents. The final section focuses on Streit’s tenure as the New York Times’ correspondent in Geneva for much of the 1930s covering the League of Nations. This extended posting provides an intriguing vantage point for reconsidering the League’s place in US foreign relations at the time.

On a warm Washington, DC evening in mid-May 1979, a reception got underway in the speakers’ dining room in the Capitol building. Cohosted by Paul Findley, a Republican representative from Illinois, and Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat and the House Majority leader, and chaired by Tip O’Neill, the House speaker from Massachusetts, the reception celebrated Clarence Streit, described as the “founder of the Atlantic Union movement and author of ‘Union Now.’” Successive speakers affectionately recalled Streit’s four decades of dedication, in Findley’s words, to the cause of “greater unity among the nations which prize individual liberty.” Wright bestowed on the guest of honor an award named after Estes Kefauver, the deceased senator from Tennessee, former vice-presidential candidate, and Streit’s political ally during the 1950s. Other tokens of admiration included a card signed by almost 200 well-wishers, as well as a book of “congratulatory messages” with entries from former presidents Nixon and Ford, among other political luminaries. Accompanied by Jeanne, his wife and collaborator of over five decades, Streit characteristically urged the attendees to continue the couple’s work. His appeal, though, did little to dent the pervasive sense of nostalgia, of bygone times, and vanishing possibilities. Afterward, Streit quickly faded from view, his death in 1986 at the age of ninety marked by perfunctory obituaries.1 Today, he is all but forgotten.