Elijah *from Missoula

Elijah from Missoula (See Cover)

The call to arms came from Edmund Orgill, Memphis' leading hardware wholesaler: "Come out tonight and help us! Are you ready for peace in this world? You are the people, the men behind desks ... in the factories . . . You are the housewives." The Press-Scimitar put Mr. Orgill's message on its front page. In a drizzly rain one night last week 300 earnest Memphians went to the Parkview Hotel to see what they could do about peace in the world.

They were civic leaders, veterans, labor leaders, teachers, students, businessmen, lawyers, priests and ministers. They were people who thought that there was a solution to the nation's international problems beyond supporting the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic pact, and the rearmament of Europe. They believed that the State Department and the Congress could do better than that.

The sense of the meeting was that U.S. foreign policy was failing. Dr. William Lovejoy, who had served overseas, stood up to say that he had seen lands liberated and freedom expanded during the war--"I had faith then in the mission of America." Now--"those who trusted us are becoming sick at heart." Two days earlier, Tennessee's junior Senator, Estes Kefauver, had taken the floor in Washington to jump on the State Department for not seeing "the need of arming our people with any powerful idea." He had an idea--the same one as the people in the Parkview Hotel. Senator Kefauver had embodied it in a resolution, but the State Department, he said, "turns up its nose" at it. Unanimously the little group of Memphis citizens demanded that his resolution be brought out of committee for a full-dress Senate debate.

The Memphis meeting was a reflection of the way some anxious Americans felt and, for that matter, the way some Congressmen felt. Filed away in committees of both houses was a wide assortment of ideas for world peace, from proposals to prop up the United Nations to grandiose schemes for a world constitution. There are 44 such resolutions in the House with more than 100 supporters; there are eight resolutions in the Senate with more than 40 supporters.

Kefauver's was one of these. His resolution proposed that the U.S. invite the other six original sponsoring nations of the North Atlantic Treaty (Britain, France, Canada, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg) to a convention to "explore how far their peoples" would go in uniting under one government--an Atlantic Union.

The idea was not originally Kefauver's. Ed Orgill's crowd had sold him on it, and then had backed him in Kefauver's spectacularly successful Senate race against the Memphis machine of Boss Ed Crump. The plan was not originally Orgill's either. It had had its origin in the mind of an ex-newspaperman, a gentle, dogged and dedicated crusader named Clarence Kirsh-man Streit (rhymes with fight).

Legion of the Single-Minded. In spite of the most persistent promotion of Clarence Streit's idea, probably a majority of U.S. citizens had never heard of it, and many who had read of it in the inside pages had long since forgotten its details. And although he had concentrated his campaign for backing on men of influence, including legislators and editors, few legislators and only a few newspapers backed it. Only a handful of well-known names appeared among the sponsors of Atlantic Union, and Clarence Streit's was a voice in the wilderness of the cities, crying but mostly unheard for more than ten years. Clarence Streit belongs to the small legion of Americans born to be touched by an idea and to give their lives to it. Slavery-hating William Lloyd Garrison, onetime apprenticed printer from Newburyport, Mass., was one. Henry George, the son of a Philadelphia publisher of religious books and indefatigable advocate of the single tax on land, was one. Suffragette Susan B. Anthony, schoolteacher from Adams, Mass., was one, Socialist Eugene Debs was another of the single-minded evangelists of a hundred causes. They were the reformers, the crusaders, sometimes the bores or the screwballs, sometimes ineffectual, sometimes movers of the world.

The Arguer. As a boy in California, Mo. (1950 pop. 3,500), Clarence Streit had no trouble imagining that the mud pond back of the Streits' four-room frame house was the Atlantic Ocean. As an adolescent, he was an addict of romantic poetry and loved to quote Sir Walter Scott ("The train from out the castle drew, but Marmion stopped to bid adieu"). He was a formidable family arguer, once suffered a whipping by father Louis Streit, farm-machinery salesman and country fiddler, for arguing so long and loudly in bed that he kept the rest of the Streit brood (two brothers, two sisters) awake half the night. The weapon father Streit used was a history of the 83rd Regiment in the Civil War, which Clarence had been reading.

But 79-year-old Louis Streit now proudly recalls: "He was always worrying about people who were bad off in India and other foreign places." Clarence was classified by his family as an idealist like his late mother, Emma Kirshman Streit. Her motto was: "'I can't never did do anything." Clarence believed in the motto.

When he was 15, the family moved to Missoula, Mont. Clarence founded his high-school newspaper, and went on to Montana State University where he edited the college newspaper, The Kaimin (meaning "message" in Salish Indian). In 1917, he solemnly refused to sign a, student resolution endorsing Woodrow Wilson's war effort--at least not until Wilson had made it clear how he was going to conduct the war. The label "pacifist" was pinned on him. But he was one of the first on the campus to volunteer, and he went to France with the 18th Engineers Railway Regiment.

His smattering of French subsequently landed him in Intelligence. Sergeant Streit, gangling and fresh-faced, served as one of the security guards at the peace conference at Versailles. There he worshiped from afar the man whom he had questioned skeptically as the leader of the war effort--Wilson, now the apostle of a great movement for peace.

Demobbed and back in the U.S., Streit finished his college education at Missoula, went off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He spent his vacations wandering around Europe, in Paris met and fell in love with blonde Jeanne Defrance. When they married, he had to quit Oxford: he went to work as a newspaperman.

Correspondent Streit covered Mussolini's March on Rome. He went to North Africa for the New York Times to report the peaceful exhuming of an older, buried civilization--Carthage--and found himself reporting the Riff war. He covered the Balkans and ended up finally covering the League of Nations in Switzerland.

The Poison. From Geneva, where he had settled with his wife and three children, Pierre, Jeanne and Colette, Streit watched the collapse of Wilson's dream of world peace. Now disillusioned, he watched as the League gagged over the march of the Japs into Manchuria in 1931, as the 1932 Disarmament Conference ended in a fiasco, as the London Economic Conference wheezingly expired. He listened as the hot winds of Naziism roared through Germany. The underlying theme of the history which he reported in long, earnest dispatches to the Times was always the same--the disunity and ineffectiveness of the democracies in meeting the crises of history. He was sure that he was attending the burial of another civilization.

He searched for causes & effects. It was about that time, with some Sunday articles in mind and looking for an angle, that he made what he thought was a major discovery. He had begun his search by dividing the contemporary world into two parts--into the democracies where the state existed for man, into the authoritarian governments where man existed for the state. To Reporter Streit an arresting fact emerged: the democracies controlled two-thirds of the world's trade, most of the world's natural resources. The democracies owned the earth and didn't know it. The totalitarian nations depended upon them for their very existence. And yet the democracies--he listed 15--were pushed about and some of them inevitably would be overwhelmed.

Analyzing the failure of the League, Journalist Streit came to one basic conclusion : it had been done in by pride, self-interest and jealousy, in short by unbridled nationalism. He conceded that nationalism could also be a matter of enlightened self-interest, patriotism, independence, other good things. But when sovereignty became a fetish, he thought, it produced more evil than good. Nationalism, he decided, was the poison that had killed peace.

Federal Union. What did hundreds of millions of individual people, he asked, gain from "absolute nationalism"? Nothing, as Streit reasoned. On the contrary, the governments, in the name of nationalism, were merely taking their people towards their own destruction.

The idea of a federal union of those hundreds of millions of people began to hatch. In such a union the separate governments would give up some of their powers. But the individual citizen, argued Streit, would lose nothing; rather he would gain new freedom and new influence as a citizen of one great and powerful democracy.

As the intellectual Austrian historian, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, ten years before saw a solution for the Continent's troubles in a European federation, Streit saw a solution for the whole world's troubles in a federation of all the democracies, including the U.S. But where Coudenhove-Kalergi thought of nationalism as a deep-seated disease, Streit simply refused to take it into his serious calculations.

In the blind, headlong years before 1938, Streit wrote his ideas into a book. Before he was through, he had worked out in careful detail the apparatus of a federal government of democracies (see chart). The executive power under the Streit plan would be held by a board of three men chosen by popular vote and two men chosen by a Senate and a House of Deputies. The Deputies would be elected by popular vote; each country would elect two Senators; countries of over 25 million would be allowed more.

The member countries, reduced somewhat to the position of states, would continue to run their domestic affairs. But the Federal Union government would handle the common defense, common currency, trade and communications of some 280 million people joined in common citizenship. He used the history of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to prove, at least to his own satisfaction, that such a metamorphosis from separate sovereignties into one union could be brought about.

He rewrote his book four times. When U.S. and British publishers continued to ignore his Union Now, he finally contracted to have the "doggone manuscript" printed at his own expense in France. In the midst of the 1938 Czech crisis, Clarence Streit's plan to save the world went into type.

It was then that Harper & Bros, in New York and Jonathan Cape in London picked up earlier versions of the manuscript from Streit's agents, read them and decided that the reeling world might like to reflect on one man's suggestions for salvation. In New York and London, Union Now appeared in the bookstores and Streit's idea was launched. A modest 13,-ooo books were sold in the U.S. It was all the encouragement that Streit needed. The idealist was reborn.

Returning to the U.S., he hit the lecture trail--a tall, gentle man with an open Midwestern face and the anxious, intent eyes of an Elijah. In one year he spent more than one-third of his nights in sleeping cars. He left the Times. He and his wife sent their children to college and lived on what he made from his lectures and an occasional article. He organized Federal Union, Inc. as the holding company of his crusade. After France fell, he scraped together $2,385 in cash and promises and bought a full-page ad in the Times to propose a provisional union of the U.S. and the British Commonwealth. He wrote another book: Union Now with Britain. While the democracies fought for immediate survival, Streit fought for what he believed was their only chance for survival even if they won World War II.

Prophet's Lot. Today in the cluttered third-floor offices of a walkup on Washington's dingy Ninth Street, N.W., 54-year-old Clarence Streit edits a magazine, Freedom & Union, which is devoted to the cause. Eight other full-time employees, plus a handful of part-time and volunteer researchers, comprise his staff. Streit is down on the modest payroll for $428 a month--his only regular income. Freedom & Union's circulation: 8,000.

This small audit would floor a less indomitable man. Streit accepts it stoically as an Elijah's lot, and plods on. He lives with his wife at the top of five flights of stairs ("Elevator Not Working") in a crumbling Victorian pile in Mount Pleasant. In a small study, where the homey confusion of the Streits' oldfashioned, high-ceilinged rooms reaches a climax of chaos, he does most of his work. In off-hours he writes verse, and (unpublished) "popular" songs.

But there are few off-hours for a crusader. If the world will not listen, then the world must be seized by the ears and explained to, argued with, exhorted.

Let Russia Whistle. He has revised his original idea somewhat. In order to get things going, he cut his original 15 nations down to a nucleus of the seven original Atlantic pact countries. But the door was wide open to all the other democracies. He and his supporters set up the Atlantic Union Committee as a political action group. He had won over the earnest aid of a few influential men, among them former Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, who quit the court to devote a large part of his time to the work, now is president of the A.U.C.; former Under Secretary of State Will Clayton, former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Historian Herbert Agar, Chemist Harold Urey (a Montana college classmate of Streit).

This was a challenging list of names. Of all the panaceas, Atlantic Union was in some ways the most practical proposition. The reason it was: the decision to take it up lay solely with the seven democracies.

In Ely Culbertson's proposal, which included a voluntary limitation of arms, there was a basic weakness; it counted on Russia's being agreeable. If Russia continued to pile up atomic weapons, Culbertson would simply serve notice on her: evacuate your industrial cities, they are going to be bombed. The World Constitution plan of Chicago University's Chancellor Robert Hutchins did not depend upon, but clung to, the hope that a way to get along with Russia might still be found.

The closest thing to Atlantic Union was United World Federalists, inspired by Cord Meyer Jr., sometime marine captain who was desperately wounded at Guam, later resolved to spend the rest of his life fighting for peace. The difference between A.U.C. and U.W.F., exaggerated by their partisans, was mainly procedural. Both pointed in the same direction.

United World Federalists, boasting wider public support than Streit's Atlantic Union Committee and some just as well-known backers,*would work out its proposal through U.N. The Cord Meyer group argued that Streit's proposal would split the non-Communist world, create a group of unhappy and neglected "Jim Crow" democracies. Under the Federalists' plan, the U.N. itself would be transformed into a world government. If Russia stayed out, the other nations would go ahead with their organization anyhow. No one but a bemused dreamer expected Russia would stay in in good faith. Streit's seven democracies could simply make up their minds to federate, go full steam ahead and let Russia go whistle.

Streit argued that his was the only answer to the union which Russia herself had already created--a Red federation which stretched from Berlin to the Pacific and the border of India.

Reactions of European officials to Clarence Streit's arguments range from a slight interest in the idea to suspicion and outright hostility. British statesmen listened to the scheme with the look of deliberate patience reserved for small children and the harmlessly insane. Down at the heel though she was, Britain was still a world power. Was someone suggesting that she become a 49th state?

The response of official Washington was just as discouraging. Streit & friends were told that even if they were headed in the right direction, they were going too fast. Better try first to bring off a European federation. Atlantic Union would disrupt U.N. and would put an unnatural and embarrassing burden on U.S. defense forces.

There were other objections, which the men of Atlantic Union are apt to brush off with statistics (which obviously do not satisfy all their listeners) or to dismiss impatiently as emotional or irrelevant. The State Department itself had two crushing replies to Atlantic Unionists: i) to get involved in all sorts of controversial discussions with U.S. allies over money, debts, immigration, etc., at this critical point might divide the Atlantic allies instead of uniting them; 2) there was as yet no widespread demand for their plan, either in the U.S. or abroad.

Despite his lectures, despite sales of his books that reached more than 80,000 in 1941 through the Book-of-the-Month Club, despite a paperbound edition of Union Now which could be bought from Federal Union for $1, Streit's was still only a voice in the wilderness of the cities, mostly unheard, certainly unheeded. This did not faze Elijah, furiously writing away in the chaotic quiet of his study in Washington.

*Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, Playwright Robert Sherwood, Historian Carl Van Doren, Commentator Raymond Swing, and Cass Canfield, chairman of the board of Harper's, which published Streit's book.

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