Harrison Tyler was the grandson of John Tyler, our tenth President of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” fame, who became President when William Henry Harrison died. When my late wife Grace and I were on our honeymoon, we met Harrison Tyler as we toured Sherwood Forest, the Tyler family home and plantation. He was still working as a chemical engineer at the time. I knew that Tyler had many offspring and was still spawning them in his 60s, but I found it astounding that his grandson was still among us. John Tyler was 63 when son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison was born.
The ethics connection popped up in Ann Althouse’s post about Harrison Tyler, who died on Memorial Day. She quoted from a biography of Tyler that called him a racist. One of Ann’s astute commenters criticized the label as injecting “a kind of modern commentary” into a biography of a 19th Century historical figure. Ann bristled at that, writing that the conduct so described was “out and proud racism” and asking, “You think that’s modern commentary”?
Another commenter slapped Ann down decisively. “The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902,” the commenter wrote. “Yes, I think labeling the mindset of an 1840’s person using a word that wasn’t in their vocabulary is an author’s intrusion.” Yet another commenter wrote, “Racism was the water people swam in back then.”
Bingo. At a time when blacks were almost universally believed to be an inferior sub-species of human, “racism” as we now define it didn’t exist. Calling a President in the 1840s a racist is like saying that physicians who practiced bleeding in the 18th century engaged in medical malpractice. It’s presentism.
I’m surprised Althouse fell into that trap.
Ethics Alarms 
I just found out about the passing of Mr. Tyler. The idea of Tyler siring children in his old age who then did the same fascinated me. To have his grandchildren still alive in the 21st century was an amazing feat of longevity.
Sadly his grandson didn’t keep up the tradition so there could be an interesting oddity tying the modern era to the distant past.
As I always say, my grandfather was George Washington.
….
(He was the lead George Washington re-enactor at Colonial Williamsburg in the 1980s)
And this notion people have that if they had lived in the past, they somehow would have known better.
No, they wouldn’t have.
I mean, yes he’s was a racist, but it doesn’t do any good pointing that out. It only does good pointing out the whole society.