For a really good comparison, you'd need yearbook photos from a variety of districts: wealthy, poor, rural, urban. Childhood nutrition and health has a lot to do with how you look, and those things are not unrelated to wealth, environment, and resources.
I can say for certain in my own family tree, there was a vast difference between those who grew up desperately poor in the Depression, and their children, born from mid-1940s to 1960s. Interestingly, the Depression generation, despite being materially poor, raised their own food and livestock and had access to fresh food. They all had beautiful teeth, in an age where orthodontics wasn't really a thing. My grandma lived to 75ish and still had every one of her teeth, no cavities. Grandma was one of *many* children, and they all stayed in the same area I grew up in, so I grew up actually knowing my dozens of first and second cousins, oodles of great-aunts, etc. The 1950s-ish generation: my parents and their cousins: they all grew up considerably more affluent and comfortable than their parents had been, but they didn't live "on the farm" and canned and packaged foods were the bees' knees for the Depression generation: cheap, easy, and you didn't have to pick weevils out of it! My parents' generation had lousy teeth. Crowded, crooked, and they've all got a few fillings. They got braces as kids, and tbh they are not as good-looking as my grandparents' set. But the polio vax was not even a thing until 1955-- they probably all got it, but a lot of them were older children at the time: 6-15 maybe. Not preschoolers. A lot of what you are going to look like is already pretty well set up by then. So if I had to take a wild guess at it, I'd reckon it had more to do with what they were eating, and possibly running down the street after the DDT truck, than with vaccination campaigns.
I do think vaccines have a lot to answer for. I just don't think it's quite as simple as comparing old photos to new ones. There's a lot going on there, and I'm not sure you can tease out that one factor so easily. If you're looking at yearbook photos, for instance, it's important to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Are you comparing wealthy kids to other wealthy kids? Poor kids to other poor kids? Recent immigrants to other recent immigrants? Are you inadvertently chopping off a huge segment of the population by comparing people who made it as far as high school in 1950, to people who made it to high school in 2020? The standards are quite different now: it used to be pretty common to quit after 8th grade to go to work.
Re: The Walking Wounded
For a really good comparison, you'd need yearbook photos from a variety of districts: wealthy, poor, rural, urban. Childhood nutrition and health has a lot to do with how you look, and those things are not unrelated to wealth, environment, and resources.
I can say for certain in my own family tree, there was a vast difference between those who grew up desperately poor in the Depression, and their children, born from mid-1940s to 1960s. Interestingly, the Depression generation, despite being materially poor, raised their own food and livestock and had access to fresh food. They all had beautiful teeth, in an age where orthodontics wasn't really a thing. My grandma lived to 75ish and still had every one of her teeth, no cavities. Grandma was one of *many* children, and they all stayed in the same area I grew up in, so I grew up actually knowing my dozens of first and second cousins, oodles of great-aunts, etc. The 1950s-ish generation: my parents and their cousins: they all grew up considerably more affluent and comfortable than their parents had been, but they didn't live "on the farm" and canned and packaged foods were the bees' knees for the Depression generation: cheap, easy, and you didn't have to pick weevils out of it! My parents' generation had lousy teeth. Crowded, crooked, and they've all got a few fillings. They got braces as kids, and tbh they are not as good-looking as my grandparents' set. But the polio vax was not even a thing until 1955-- they probably all got it, but a lot of them were older children at the time: 6-15 maybe. Not preschoolers. A lot of what you are going to look like is already pretty well set up by then. So if I had to take a wild guess at it, I'd reckon it had more to do with what they were eating, and possibly running down the street after the DDT truck, than with vaccination campaigns.
I do think vaccines have a lot to answer for. I just don't think it's quite as simple as comparing old photos to new ones. There's a lot going on there, and I'm not sure you can tease out that one factor so easily. If you're looking at yearbook photos, for instance, it's important to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Are you comparing wealthy kids to other wealthy kids? Poor kids to other poor kids? Recent immigrants to other recent immigrants? Are you inadvertently chopping off a huge segment of the population by comparing people who made it as far as high school in 1950, to people who made it to high school in 2020? The standards are quite different now: it used to be pretty common to quit after 8th grade to go to work.