Teddy Roosevelt, though obsessed with the “English-speaking peoples,” spoke French and German and could follow along in Italian. Woodrow Wilson, the era’s other scholar-president, read German scholarship and contemplated moving to Europe to better learn the language. Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy, his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately. The polyglot presidency was a reaction to a world teeming
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