Why Is Everything Bigger in Texas?

The stars at night are big and bright—and so is everything else—deep in the heart of Texas.

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n some flights into Dallas, flight attendants jokingly tell passengers to prepare for landing by putting their seatbacks—and their hair—in the most fully upright and tallest position.

“Everything is Bigger in Texas” goes the saying, but where did it start—and exactly who says it? Was it a marketing effort, like the famous “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering campaign, or was it more homegrown?

Texas was the largest state in the United States by land area for over a hundred years, from when it joined the union in 1845 to 1959 when it was eclipsed by Alaska, which is nearly two and a half times larger. Despite having been in “second place” for over 65 years, the notion that Texas is the source of outsized hairstyles, personality, and attitudes has persisted.

Dr. Richard McCaslin, director of publications at the Texas State Historical Association pointed us to this post that found the phrase “Everything’s bigger in Texas” was certainly popularized by the 1950s, right before Texas lost the theoretical “crown” to Alaska (at the time there was much to-do about it, mostly in Alaska).

The notion that things were “bigger” or “big” in Texas, is mostly preserved in newspapers and periodicals, and the earliest uses of similar phrases appear to have emerged between 1880 and 1915. But it’s also important to remember context. Many of the periodicals we found the phrases in weren’t Texan, many of them seemed to share anecdotes about Texans bragging of the size of things in their state in a manner that approached caricature.

Newspapers of the era tended to sensationalize and were quick to trade in stereotypes, but the truth is typically somewhere in the middle. Texans, and others from the West, were reported to tell some tall tales about the size and beauty of everything from their homes to the produce to the inhabitants. But where does this outsized pride come from? It could be explained as an attempt to assert some dignity in the face of city-dwelling Easterners who tended to view rural or Western Americans as unsophisticated, and push back on urban assumptions about rural life (in the late 19th century, the only city west of Chicago with any significant population was San Francisco).

It can also be noted that it was primarily in the popular press rather than newspapers of record, where the mentions can be found. Newspapers of record like The New York Times, don’t make any mention of either the phrase “bigger in Texas” or “Texas-sized” until the 1950s.

But Why Is Texas Big?

So, the idiom seems not to refer to the size of the state itself, but rather the largeness of its personalities.

But Texas is a big state. El Paso, on its westernmost tip, is closer to the Pacific Coast than it is to the state’s eastern border with Louisiana. But why is Texas so much bigger than other states?

The answer has to do with how Texas joined the union. Texas was originally claimed by Spain and then transferred to Mexico after independence. A group of American settlers fought for independence from Mexico, largely over the issue of slavery, winning the battle in 1836, and forming the Republic of Texas. Mexico, however, never formally recognized the independence of Texas, and when officials from the Republic of Texas first proposed annexation by the United States, it was declined, as the U.S. feared war with Mexico.

Texas was finally annexed in 1845 and immediately went from becoming an independent republic to becoming a state, without the intermediary step of declaring it a territory. This ultimately did spur a war with Mexico, in which the United States won the rest of Mexico’s land claims from Texas to the Pacific Coast.

Because slavery was legal in Texas, and the continued legality of slavery was a condition on Texas joining the union, it was admitted whole as a compromise to abolitionists in the North who wanted to limit the number of slaveholding states to maintain the balance of power between them (and later paved the way for California to be admitted to the union as a free state after the Mexican Cession).

Big—and Diverse

Another sense of the “bigness” of Texas lies in the diversity of its geography and people. Texas isn’t a single landscape or personality. Sure, it’s plains and cowboys, but it’s also piney woods, swampy bayous, stretches of long sandy gulf coast beaches, rocky deserts and tree-dotted hills, and mountain peaks.

Early settlers from the U.S. were called Texians. In exchange for the right to buy land in Texas on credit (the early 19th-century United States, facing a budget crunch, required payment in cash), American settlers became Mexican citizens, converted to Catholicism, and (in principle but not practice) did not rely on enslaved workers.

In the 19th century, Texas was already a cosmopolitan mix of people—white American settlers, enslaved and free Black people, Native Americans from a wide swath of tribes, and the Spanish-speaking Creole descendants of the earliest Spanish and Mexican settlers known as Tejanos who had intermarried with Native Americans. They were joined later in the century by German and Czech immigrants fleeing poverty and political instability in Central Europe, and they largely settled in central Texas, forming communities like Fredericksburg, which were almost entirely German-speaking until the mid-20th century.

One thing those settlers found was abundance. They found their steers did in fact grow big, and so did their produce, so when it came time to cook, they found themselves with a lot of food. And of course, they shared it—and that was the harbinger of the large portions visitors will find in Texas today, everywhere from German and Czech restaurants (there are plenty throughout Central Texas and the DFW metroplex) to the Tex-Mex cantinas popularized by the Tejanos and fed from that same abundance (brisket tacos, anyone?).

The 20th century brought economic growth, drawing even more new residents, and today there are sizable immigrant populations in Dallas and Houston, largely of Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese heritage. They’ve contributed to the “bigness” of Texas, ironically defeating the notions of Texas as a backwater that may have driven the earliest outward travelers to lean on tall tales to assert the worth of their home state.

After all, there are many different ways to talk about size—area, volume, depth—and beneath the surface, Texas is big in these ways, too. Her history is nuanced. Sometimes those tall tales are tall, and sometimes there’s more than a kernel of truth behind them.

So, when we talk about things being bigger in Texas, that’s certainly true—but it’s not necessarily just the size of the state’s land area or the big-and-tall hair (“the higher the hair, the closer to Heaven,” they say around here) or the ten-gallon hats. It’s a bigness of aspiration, a bigness of welcome, a bigness of appetite.

Everything may not actually be bigger in Texas. But big, most things certainly are—by any measure.