Tilden was opposed to mass democracy in general: as a 'reformer' in New York City he had argued in favour of restricting the franchise to property owners only, in order to stop ethnically questionable immigrants from voting for Tammany Hall. His public image remains absurdly favourable given who he was and what he actually stood for, and this is largely due to the fact that the schools history textbooks that shaped popular understanding of American history for so long were written by Democratic Party hacks of the old school; men like Samuel Eliot Morison.
An argument can be made that the same is true of popular understandings of the Stalwart/Half-Breed split within the GOP, although in that case the conventional historiography is at least not obviously and straightforwardly wrong, only simplistic and dismissive of the very good reasons why Certain Folk felt defensive of the spoils system.
It's very appropriate that Morison would be the one to promote this line of historical thinking since in his autobiography of his youth (
One Boy's Boston) he criticizes the myth that Boston Brahmin families like his own were invariably straight ticket Republicans and writes that his own family were Mugwumps who regarded Cleveland as the best President since Lincoln. Morison's father ran as a "Civil Service Reform" independent against a black Republican candidate for the Massachusetts General Court in 1896 but lost. Tellingly, Morison's elders strongly opposed a bill to erect an equestrian statue of Benjamin Butler at the State House in Boston.
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