Richard Bartholdt (1855-1932) was a U. S. Representative from Missouri. He immigrated to the United States from Germany in April 1872 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. He learned the printing trade and became a newspaper writer and publisher. He moved to Missouri and settled in St. Louis in 1877. He served as member of the St. Louis Board of Education from 1888 to 1892, serving as president from 1890 to 1892. He was elected as a Republican to the Fifty-third and to the ten succeeding Congresses (1893-1915). He served as chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Committee on Levees and Improvements of the Mississippi River and Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds. He served as chairman of the Republican State convention at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1896. Bartholdt was elected president of the Interparliamentary Union at the conference held in St. Louis in 1904, and for many years was president of the arbitration group in Congress, which he founded in 1903. Bartholdt was an esperantist, and in 1914 he proposed a resolution to have Esperanto taught in American schools.