POLITICS JANUARY 23, 2012
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Every four years, it seems, one of the major issues in the U.S. presidential campaign is how many languages the candidates speak, the implication being: the fewer, the better. This year, we’ve seen Newt Gingrich knock Mitt Romney for speaking French, as well as general mockery of Jon Huntsman for his displays of speaking Mandarin Chinese. In 2004, it was John Kerry who was derided by George W. Bush for being a Francophile who “looks French.” And in 2008, Barack Obama faced criticism for his upbringing in Indonesia.
It’s tempting to suppose this is an expression of a boorish—and typically American—lack of interest in other languages and cultures. More specifically, one smells an unreflective jingoism among Republicans. Does the GOP think that part of being serious Presidential timber is to speak only English? That’s probably an oversimplification. In general the issue is not whether a presidential candidate speaks more than one language—it’s which languages he speaks and how.
The knocks on Romney and Kerry for speaking French are, for example, rooted in a particular problem that Republicans have with Europe. The idea is that by speaking that language, they may have inhaled some of the socialist political philosophies, not to mention the anti-American ideology, associated with France. Gingrich, by contrast, hasn’t received any flack for learning some Spanish. (This, despite having previously dismissed the language of Cervantes as “the language of living in a ghetto.”) A further thought experiment: How would Republicans feel about Romney if he spoke a gruff, confident German? Note that this would have been less likely to have been spun as seeming vaguely disloyal or un-American; it would have seemed, to most, rather cool.
Huntsman, meanwhile, has been mocked for speaking Chinese partly because he has been somewhat showy about it, and partly because the language lends itself to that kind of “look at me!” presentation in being such a challenge to English learners. Huntsman’s Mandarin competence looks less un-American than ostentatious, geeky. Presumably a more humbly-borne competence in that language would be seen as a plus for someone vying for the Oval Office at a time when China is playing an ever larger role in the world. (And as a historic matter, knowledge of Chinese is certainly not a disqualification for the presidency: Herbert Hoover and his wife spoke some Chinese after having lived there for a year and change, often using it in the White House when they didn’t want to be understood.)
Ultimately, aside from the ways that bilingualism can be exploited over the course of a campaign, there is the practical question as to how relevant speaking another language is to running the free world. Obviously, if a President could carry on high-level discussions with heads of state in other countries, it would be of inestimable value to forging personal ties with them.
But the truth is that one can speak a language to varying extents, and the ability to carry on a brief casual conversation is quite different from being able to discuss trade policy—or even be able to describe one’s inner feelings, or say “upside down” or “Never mind.” Huntsman’s ability to converse in Mandarin is impressive, certainly: He’s gotten far past the level of John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” line in German by a long shot. (For the record: It’s a myth that Kennedy called himself a pastry.) But his Mandarin is ultimately functional at best, only somewhat better than George W. Bush’s famous attempts at Spanish. It’s just easier for Americans to glean how partial someone’s command of Spanish is, because so many of us learn some of it ourselves. Obama’s Indonesian is functional, but similarly limited to Huntsman's Mandarin—predictable, since he hasn’t used it in almost forty years. So it’s exceedingly unlikely that any American president would be conversing with a foreign leader in a foreign language. Translators would likely always have to be used beyond the hellos and thank yous.
The simple fact is that being an American career politician or businessman is antithetical to being fluent in more than one language. Learning another language on the level that would be truly useful for a President would require spending one’s life, or even a significant part of it, living in its confines. American politicians simply don’t have that opportunity. If Barack Obama had spent twenty years in Indonesia, he likely wouldn’t have ever gotten to Chicago, and so on.
It nevertheless remains striking how little bilingualism there has been among the 44 men who have been elected President. The only one who was actually raised in two languages and spoke both throughout his life was Martin Van Buren, who was raised in Dutch, as was still common in New York State in his time. His wife was also raised in a Dutch home and always had a Dutch accent. Van Buren was even known to erupt into Dutch invective when angry. Barack Obama’s disinclination to do the same in Indonesian is probably, in the end, a good call.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
33 comments
"In 2004, it was John Kerry who was derided by George W. Bush for being a Francophile who “looks French.”" I missed this. Kerry doesn't look French, whatever that means. Think de Gaulle and then Think Sarkozy. I'll take Kerry's "French" looks to Bush's "Alfred E. Neuman" look any time. At least Kerry looks like a grown up. Gingrich too has that Alfred Neuman look. What is it with these Republicans who tend to look like old men who never grew up.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 12:09am
Both my daughters, Canadian, are bilingual, being fluent in French and English. Accordingly, I have given up my dream of one or both of them being president of your United States. (I figured I'd commission Donald Trump to get them each a Hawaiian birth certificate to get around that little obstacle.)
- basman
January 23, 2012 at 1:03am
Gingrich may not speak French, but apparently he wants the prerogatives of a French President, e.g. Mitterand, to have a wife and a mistress. Romney's French is one of the handful of things I count in his favor; it was honed as a missionary in France - it would be priceless to see a film of those efforts! Encore quatre ans pour Obama!
- bjones
January 23, 2012 at 8:32am
I find the notion that an American business person could not possibly have the time to be fluent in another language rather odd. I work every day with people who are not native English speakers, but nevertheless manage to have a perfectly usable grasp of the language while being successful businessmen or women, and some native English speakers who have spent years abroad and managed the converse.
- IowaBeauty
January 23, 2012 at 9:02am
"I work every day with people who are not native English speakers, but nevertheless manage to have a perfectly usable grasp of the language while being successful businessmen or women, and some native English speakers who have spent years abroad and managed the converse." This is familiar, but not the whole story. Many, many, American from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to Ernest Hemingway were multi-lingual but kept it to themselves. I know colleagues who resist the idea that Hemingway spoke and read French, Spanish, Italian. Our culture resists multilingualism. Ironically, (because we think of the French as effete multilinguals) so does French culture.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 9:10am
"Learning another language on the level that would be truly useful for a President would require spending one’s life, or even a significant part of it, living in its confines." Huh? If a child spends only a few years in a foreign country, he can acquire fluency and maintain it if he has the opportunity to use it regularly. Likewise I know many, many, many bi-lingual Spanish/English speakers who have never set foot in a latin American Country (or Puerto Rico USA). Bi-lingual education should be begun in Kindergarten. Additional language acquisition literally makes your brain work better. I also have to say, after having lived in China for 7 years, that if Hoover and his wife could use Chinese that well after just one year, they both must have been brilliant people. I think it likely that it was somekind of pidgin Chinese of a few set phrases. Myself, I never use Chinese with my wife in front of other people because I consider it rude, the only reason I think I would is to mock or criticize the people I am with. And conversational Chinese is nowhere as difficult as people think, it is when you get into the weeds (like trade policy) that things get nightmarish. It is, for me, the opposite with Spanish. I can read most Spanish business books with little difficulty, Vargas Llosa, otoh, is a lost cause. Arnon, French, Spanish, Italian have a lot of similarities (especially Italian and Spanish) it is not as unlikely as you think. Now if you could speak Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and English, well that would impress the hell out of me.
- blackton
January 23, 2012 at 10:08am
Blackton: “Arnon, French, Spanish, Italian have a lot of similarities (especially Italian and Spanish) it is not as unlikely as you think. Now if you could speak Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and English, well that would impress the hell out of me.” I guess I didn’t get my point across, I wasn’t saying that Hemingway was special because he was able to handle himself in these three Latin based languages. My emphasis was elsewhere: I can understand why ordinary voters might not trust candidates who speak foreign languages. That’s an old even atavistic attitude: we don’t trust people who are not like us and nothing shows how different people are than their speech. (Even race is less telling of differences; it “skin deep”). Hence I am not surprised that demagogic candidates would single out a Kerry because he speaks French. But what baffles me is a similar attitude among professors. I pointed to the skepticism I encountered among Americanists when I mentioned that Hemingway wasn’t mono-lingual. What you say about cognate languages being easier to learn than languages from different language groups is true up to a point. For every day speech I am sure that learning Chinese or Hebrew, or Arabic, or Lakota is more difficult than learning Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. However, to show proficiency say in writing complex descriptions in a cognate language is just as difficult if not more so. In a Romance language you not only have to remember different vocabulary you also have to remember to distinguish between false cognates, words that sound alike but have different meanings.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 11:41am
As for American presidents? well, we are lucky the Brits left English as an imperial legacy, and that languages that do not use Roman characters are at such a disadvantage in 24/7 globalization. I had to spend three weeks in Indonesia in 1997, and found their "invented" common language Bahasa Indonesian very easy to learn in those three weeks - for the basics. Uses a lot of Latin roots. Created for an archipelago nation with 18,000+ islands and more than 1,000 tribal languages. Terima Kasih! On the other end of the spectrum, I spent four years working with Finns, and never learned more than five words in that very unique language - which is very useful for online passwords. I use Finnish words all the time for passwords because they always get very strong ratings. Romney asked for that French-slam once he tried to use his "real world" encounter with the absence of plumbing during his hardship stint as a Mormon missionary in France, a fact he tried to hide until confronted with his rich-kid image problem.
- K2K
January 23, 2012 at 11:59am
"But what baffles me is a similar attitude among professors. I pointed to the skepticism I encountered among Americanists when I mentioned that Hemingway wasn’t mono-lingual." Arnon, want to name some names? I'm not sure if you mean e.g. colleagues on an MLA panel or just people in your department. It certainly sounds a curious reaction to have. Hemingway spent decades, if you count it all up, in Spanish-speaking places. It would be quite astonishing if he didn't build up a reasonable capability in the language. John Kerry looks a bit Scandinavian, I think.
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 12:12pm
What colleagues, what department?
- basman
January 23, 2012 at 12:38pm
"Arnon, want to name some names? I'm not sure if you mean e.g. colleagues on an MLA panel or just people in your department.": No, Irony, I will not name anyone. My experience exceeds a single department, but I'll say no more.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 1:06pm
"Hemingway spent decades, if you count it all up, in Spanish-speaking places. It would be quite astonishing if he didn't build up a reasonable capability in the language." Of course, and he spent many years in France and also in Italy. I was making a comment about professors of American literature.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 1:08pm
malahat "Faulting anyone for having knowledge is the pinnacle of stupidity." No, not faulting, disregarding it when not denying it outright.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 2:00pm
Arnon wrote: I can understand why ordinary voters might not trust candidates who speak foreign languages. That’s an old even atavistic attitude: we don’t trust people who are not like us and nothing shows how different people are than their speech. I'm reminded of the woman who, when interviewed about why she was voting for Palin, said "she [Palin] reminds me of me". It seems that many American voters are suspicious of, or even fear, candidates that are much more educated than the voters are. Speaking another language is, at least in the U.S., an indication that you are either not a native-born U.S. citizen or else are more highly-educated than most. In either case, you are not someone who reminds voters of themselves.
- mrheckman
January 23, 2012 at 3:19pm
"I was making a comment about professors of American literature." I know you were, arnon. Hence my question in response. Being one myself, I'm rather curious about this issue.
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 3:51pm
Irony, where is the study in American literature that is the counterpart of Curtius' "European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages" which looks at European literature as a cross cultural Western phenomenon?
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 4:03pm
Arnon, well, it depends if you mean the exact equivalent of Curtius's magisterial study or simply people thinking and writing about that range of questions. If the latter, recent possibilities might include Wai-Chee Dimock's Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006) and Martha Banta's The One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic (2007), both of which take as a given that American literature and other arts were not living in some hermetically sealed cultural chamber. And they are just two off the top of my head. Going back further, the Transcendentalists were deeply indebted to German Romanticism in particular: in a particularly heroic effort (given her domestic situation) Margaret Fuller learned German well enough during 1840-1 to produce a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe that George Ripley published in Boston in his Standard Foreign Literature series. Just in general, to me it's a strange assumption if somebody claims that, for example, Moby Dick, Absalom, Absalom! or "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" are completely unconnected to European literature and are only "American" in some kind of narrow and provincial way.
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 6:04pm
Irony, I agree with your conclusion, but the two works you cite are of very recent vintage. Until very recently the going assumptions was that Melville's Moby Dick was a rebellion against European (English in his case) literature. And that isn't far from the truth in Pierre Melville's hero joins the Young Americans whose aim is to declare independence from foreign sources. The same with Emerson who was indebted to European transcendentalism hectored his readers to trust only oneself not give oneself over to older models. This is what Whitman did. These assumptions were turned into an unwritten law that real Americans don't cite foreign authors or speak French.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 6:58pm
Irony, I just read this description of Dimock's book: "Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context." You compared this parody of a study to Curtius? You have got to be kidding, no?
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 7:41pm
Irony, here is a blurb on Martha Banta's book: "Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge—artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry—brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested." Again, I don't recognize any affinity to the kind of literary study that even begins to resemble what Curtius of Auerbach achieved.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 7:56pm
Just following along from the pedestrian sidelines. ....I know colleagues who resist the idea that Hemingway spoke and read French, Spanish, Italian... I thought this assertion was the issue as it pertains to professors of American literature, some dude's colleagues.
- basman
January 23, 2012 at 8:20pm
Do not want to otherwise interrupt a sideline into academia. 01/23/2012 - 12:12pm EDT | ironyroad "John Kerry looks a bit Scandinavian, I think." I am counting that as humor, not because John Kerry does not have blonde hair, or because he has an Irish last name, but because when was it that John Kerry discovered he had a Jewish grandfather? Which would make him not so welcome in today's Norway or Sweden. When I used to be in Helsinki or Stockholm on business (late 1990's), I found it really funny that all the television commercials featured sultry brown-eyed, dark brown haired women, because that is so exotic whereas, in America, we still seem to have a preference for blue-eyed blondes, rapidly being replaced by all sorts of dogs in commercials for every product imagineable. Looking forward to the TNR post that delves into why Santorum has to drop out because his wife is not a blonde :)
- K2K
January 23, 2012 at 8:33pm
True, he doesn't have fair hair, but he has that tall and big-boned but slightly gawky frame that I seem to remember seeing in guys and women too from up there, as well as (oddly, for a Catholic) a kind of pedagogical Lutheran earnestness. Humor? I'll take it where I can get it!
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 9:34pm
Arnon, I thought your point was that Curtius argued for the interrelationship of European literatures, pointing to roots in a transnational (inter-regional) Latinate culture of the Middle Ages, and that nobody had done that for American literature. My original comment specifically said "it depends if you mean the exact equivalent of Curtius's magisterial study or simply people thinking and writing about that range of questions." So, both Dimock and Banta have not replicated Curtius but they have been thinking about the relationship of American literature and the public arts to non-American sources of content, values, and reception. There's something wrong with that? Everyone has their own taste in criticism, but it seems to me you are the one making a comparison without having read either of the books in question, apart from the blurb. Personally, I think the Banta book is pretty impressive, while the Dimock is entertaining and provocative but I don't buy all of it. Incidentally, on Melville, it's arguable in a somewhat limited sense that Moby Dick was "a rebellion against European literature" but I'm not sure how far one can take that. It's certainly, in its ambition and scope, very conscious of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Maybe it's not a European-American zero-sum game?
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 9:48pm
You have said a lot Irony, I'll answer only this point for now: "So, both Dimock and Banta have not replicated Curtius but they have been thinking about the relationship of American literature and the public arts to non-American sources of content, values, and reception. There's something wrong with that?" I wasn't asking for an exact 'replica of the Curtius book, but I was asking something more substantial than a wild comparison between Gilgamesh and Henry James. Curtius uses stylistic, thematic and historical comparisons to draw out a relationship between literatures and authors. What Dimock seems to be saying is that all literature is inter-related, and so it is but so is all food seen from the standpoint of the alimentary canal. Granted that Banta's book seems more substantial but it isn't about language and narrative literature. If I have time I might read that book sometime.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 10:25pm
“Incidentally, on Melville, it's arguable in a somewhat limited sense that Moby Dick was "a rebellion against European literature" but I'm not sure how far one can take that. It's certainly, in its ambition and scope, very conscious of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Maybe it's not a European-American zero-sum game?” Every notion is “arguable,” Irony. Melville specifically sets his book up as a challenge to Milton’s Paradise lost and a number of Shakespeare’s plays like Othello and Lear. He may allude to Homer but he is too preoccupied with Milton and Shakespeare to work the ancient bard into his narrative in any significant way. Rather than Homer I would say that it’s the Hebrew bible that is more integrated into Melville’s yarn: Ishmael, Ahab, Job, Jonah, etc. are major figures in this text too. As for it being or not being a “zero-sum-game,” that’s not a notion that he was working with. He was trying to put American literature on the map as it were, to have it taken as seriously as English literature. He didn’t wish US letters to be considered a sub category of British writing. Interestingly, Henry James was for a time involved in the same project. Both of them also wrote essays on Hawthorne citing him as America’s first significant writer. Melville though made some bold claims about his friend (he saw him as our Shakespeare and his equal).
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 10:44pm
Here is a quote from Melville’s Hawthorne and his Mosses that you may appreciate: “In Shakespeare's tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so much for what he did do, as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,--even though it be covertly, and by snatches. But if this view of the all-popular Shakespeare be seldom taken by his readers, and if very few who extol him, have ever read him deeply, or, perhaps, only have seen him on the tricky stage, (which alone made, and is still making him his mere mob renown)--if few men have time, or patience, or palate, for the spiritual truth as it is in that great genius;--it is, then, no matter of surprise that in a contemporaneous age, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a man, as yet, almost utterly mistaken among men. Here and there, in some quiet arm- chair in the noisy town, or some deep nook among the noiseless mountains, he may be appreciated for something of what he is. But unlike Shakespeare, who was forced to the contrary course by circumstances, Hawthorne (either from simple disinclination, or else from inaptitude) refrains from all the popularizing noise and show of broad farce, and blood-besmeared tragedy; content with the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in repose, and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart…”
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 10:48pm
Arnon, Banta's book is indeed, in part, about narrative literature, it just doesn't say so in the blurb. Dimock's book is about more than James and Gilgamesh but I don't see the slightest reason why a speculative argument about narrative can't take in both. Not everything is arguable -- for example, it would be difficult to argue that Hemingway was deeply influenced by Madame de Stäel or that Chaucer was an Arab immigrant to England -- but many things are. What you say about Melville is arguable too. I don't regard that as a negative. In fact, I find quite often that you seem to be saying things I don't have any major disagreement with (on points, sure) so I wonder why you are berating me as if I'm fighting you on every front. It's the humanities, not biochemistry -- and even in science different paradigms of knowledge can co-exist (Kuhn).
- ironyroad
January 23, 2012 at 11:02pm
Oy, Kuhn, Irony? Well, ours is a disagreement readers working within the same paradigm. As for Madame de Stael, I'd be surprised if Hemingway hadn't read her when he was in Paris. He must have read at least "De l'Allemagne..." I'd have to check the Kennedy library which houses his books to see if he had kept anything by her. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection/Research-Room.aspx I would probably have to go there.
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 11:20pm
"Well, ours is a disagreement readers working within the same paradigm." Should read: "Well, ours is a disagreement AMONG readers working within the same paradigm."
- arnon
January 23, 2012 at 11:30pm
Obama El Presidente De Los Desempleados. Obama Le President Du Peuple Sans Travail. Obama The Jobless President.
- JAIMECHUCH
January 24, 2012 at 3:29am
Obama Rosh Hamedina Shel Anashim Bli Avodah.
- JAIMECHUCH
January 24, 2012 at 3:39am
Tom Kuhn, why not? Nice fella, used to run a diner at 10th and Main. I'd often bump into Hemingway in there mornings, he was always reading Madame de Stäel. And Cavafy. You couldn't pull him away from his Cavafy.
- ironyroad
January 24, 2012 at 11:25am