Streit was born in California, Missouri, the son of Louis Leland Streit and Emma (Kirschman) Streit. Of
Palatine German origin, he relocated with his family to
Missoula, Montana, in 1911. In Missoula, he founded the Konah, a high school newspaper 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 during 1920. He married Jeanne Defrance in Paris in 1921, after which he became a foreign correspondent for
The New York Times. In 1929, he was assigned to cover the
League of Nations in Switzerland, where he witnessed the League's slow disintegration. That experience, coupled with the development of totalitarian regimes in Europe, convinced him that mankind's best hope was a federal union of democracies, modeled on American federalism. This caused 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 1939, just prior to World War II. After the book's publication, Streit founded Federal Union, Inc. (later renamed the Association to Unite the Democracies) to promote his idea. Seeking what he described as "a man of national stature" to help publicize his efforts, he was able to secure the endorsement of Supreme Court Justice
Owen Roberts, who would be a friend and collaborator during the years subsequent. In 1949, Streit joined the board of the Roberts-directed
Atlantic Union Committee, which advocated a
federation of democratic states. The Streit Council, a successor organization to the Association to Unite the Democracies, was named for him. ==Personal life==