White Man's burden and Manifest Destiny

‎"We have but room for one Language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse."
-Theodore Roosevelt
This, coming from the president of one century ago, is not surprising. But what is currently so tragic is that the United States persisits in such a xenophobic, parochial and counter-productive attitude. This nation would benefit enormously from a sensible recognition that a far larger number of us should be fluent in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and scores of other idioms. We do indeed speak our version of English - Americanese - and it is the preeminent Global tongue... for now. But as every other commentator and her father-in-law never tires of reminding us, we're in a Globalized scenario now. We need to pick up on what the world has to say, and not just in our habitual, half-assed, monolingual way.