IME, American public schools tended to teach French more than any other language.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. It was the prestigious foreign language and the language of international diplomacy

up until World War II. Paris was the cultural capital of Europe, where the most advanced and adventurous art, music, literature, and film was being produced. A lot of American artists and musicians and actors and writers lived there for at least a couple of years in the first half of the twentieth century. My stepfather's parents, who were both pianists, spent the first two years of their married life (1910-12) in Paris, which was when everybody who was anybody in the arts lived and/or studied there.

Rich people the world over, especially in Imperial Russia, but also in the U.S. and England, hired French governesses so that their children would grow up as semi-native speakers of French.

Furthermore, a lot of American GIs passed through France in World War I and World War II.

It was the European country that most Americans knew about.

Spanish was taught in the American Southwest, California, and Texas, which had strong cultural ties with Mexico, and in the New York area, where there were Puerto Rican immigrants, but until recent years, there simply weren't that many Latinos in most parts of the U.S.

In the 1960s, there was ONE Mexican restaurant in the entire Twin Cities metropolitan area.