Are there many “little people” (specifically adult people of very short stature) holding elective office (or working anywhere else in the bureaucracy) in the USA or elsewhere?
Hi-Ho! This is an interesting question, so I’m bumping it.
How about former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
Taller than Madeline Albright!
True. Maddy’s got Rob beat by an inch, it seems.
Alan Eggleston Australian Senator since 1996 Definitely a dwarf
Thats the only one I found. He’s also a retired medical doctor.
I was going to suggest Stephen Douglas (best known in the U.S. as Lincoln’s opponent), but when I googled his height, the published references I saw gave a fairly average height of 5’4".
I was under the impression he was conspicuously short, even by the standards of the 1850s. Like 4’10" or less.
Maybe he only looked short next to Abraham Lincoln.
Sandra Borch is the leader of the Norwegian Centre Party’s youth organization. She hasn’t yet held a national office in her own right, but she is a member of the Troms County assembly and has served as a substitute MP. She is 147 cm tall, about 4’ 7".
It’s not your fault. You were lied to by some of the journalists of the time. They tended to exaggerate the “little giant”. Take for example this quote from journalist Henry Villard after the Ottawa debate on August 21, 1858:
Lincoln’s height was also exaggerated. Even so, I think this cartoon is a bit extreme:
http://lincolnkennedyobamaproject.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/4/7/13472455/6977573.jpg?164
And here’s a cartoon with both of their heights exaggerated:
This article mentions Charley Lockhart, who was state treasurer in Texas and who was 3’9":
It also mentions Benito Juárez, a president of Mexico in the nineteenth century, who was 4’6".
Paul Steven Miller was 4’5" and on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for ten years. He was later a law professor and then a special assistant to Obama:
PresidentOmar Bongo of Gabon was only 5’0". He was rumored to have some pygmy ancestry (but that may have just been a political slur, since pygmies are considered very low status in Gabon.)
Sen. Barbara Boxer of California is maybe 4’11" and has been known to show up at speaking events with bring her own box to stand on.
Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims to be an even 5 feet, but she’s most likely lost height as she’s aged.
I’m a bad person. The words I bolded made me giggle like a schoolgirl.
While they’re certainly short women, they don’t technically meet the accepted definition for being a dwarf or “little person”, which is an adult height of 4’10" or shorter.
In fact, for the purposes of this thread, why don’t we say that what we’re looking for are men who are 5’ or less and women who are 4’10" or less? Otherwise this is going to turn into one of those threads where the people keep stretching the bounds of what’s being asked further and further till the definition of the term being discussed becomes pointless. Here’s one more example of someone who may barely fit into this thread - Fiorello La Guardia:
There is some question though of what his height really was, since some sources claim that he was 5’ and some say that he was 5’2".