ORGANIZATIONS: Elijah *from Missoula

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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.