Whatever happened to tall Texans?
Changes over time in average height are an interesting example of nature and nurture of obvious possible relevance to speculations over the genetic and environmental manipulation of IQ.
One of the cliches of Golden Age Hollywood movies was that Texans were tall and that cowboys were long-legged.
For example, the 1953 movie The Tall Texan starred Lloyd Bridges (6’0”), whose sons were Jeff Bridges (6’1”) and Beau Bridges (5’9”).
My guess is that native Texans of a century or more ago did tend to be taller than their cousins in, say, Virginia, due to eating more meat. This is not to say that Americans in general weren’t pretty tall by European standards, but that out on the range in Texas, where beef was especially cheap, Americans grew especially tall.
Are Texans still really tall? A 2017 federal report of self-reported heights, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, suggests that white Texans now tend to be rather short, especially compared to Upper Midwesterners:
It makes sense that places like Iowa with a lot of Dutch, who are now exceptionally tall in Europe, would tend to be tall in the U.S. Yet, the shortness of white Southwesterners suggests that the feds are getting some Hispanics or part Hispanics mixed in with whites.
So how tall are 100% non-Hispanic white Texans today? Hard to say… Still, it’s likely that the Texas advantage of a century ago from eating more beef has diminished.
I object to the chart’s measurements in the strongest terms I can muster.
We are not a metric country. We were not blackmailed into accepting it like the UK was (adoption was a precondition for entrance into the Common Market), nor was it imposed on us by French bayonets (every country conquered by Revolutionary France or Napoleon). Don’t contribute to the rot!
It is still true that there are two types of countries: those that use the metric system, and those that have landed men on the moon!
Good piece otherwise.
There is something to this. My oldest went to a Republican dominated private school from K-8. We switched him to a very liberal private high school (for various reasons). One of the first things he noticed was how much smaller the girls were. Very few of the boys had a beefy, muscular look either. I went to a few school events over the years (not many) and saw how meat avoidance was definitely a "thing". It blows me away that liberals will allow their political views to affect their offspring in an adverse way.
My son is 6'2 btw. We eat meat in this house :)