I just read through this entire thread. Very interesting indeed!
It's amazing to me this discussion about Merion and what Macdonald/Whigam's "advising" Merion really means has been going on for over six years!!
(RJ Daley, I expect another comment from you on that, and, as in the past, I will be right with you and in agreement!).
It's also nice to see how civil and cooperative we all were with one another in 2003 when a very fine discussion was being carried on in this thread in 2003.
What I'd forgotten is that this thread was brought back up over a year after it began, apparently by Tom MacWood. That was in May, 2004. At that time it appears he brought it back up to be something of a supplement to some thread he started on how "legends" are treated and analyzed via research and perhaps historically glorified leading to inaccuracies. That's an interesting subject, I guess, and one that any "legend" should probably undergo some kind of "catechism" from time to time.
It seems it was at that point MacWood started implying, stating actually, that he felt that people like Wayne Morrison and I were not being objective enough, which I suppose seemingly means we were not and are not looking at our subject of Merion and its history from a proper research perspective.
MacWood mentions on May 8, 2004 that he looks at it from the perspective of logic and common-sense!! Do you suppose his implication is that Wayne and I don't look at it from the perspective of logic and common-sense? It would certainly seem so.
And then Tom MacWood suggests something I still find very odd---and that is that people become too subjective if they get too close to a subject which I suppose also means knowing far more about it than anyone else. While there may be some truth to that in some cases, I can tell you all that Wayne and I feel we can never get TOO CLOSE to the history of Merion and any and all details about it!
In any case, that seems to be where the real rancor over Merion (and PV) started on these threads. That was when MacWood floated this idea of some on-going "Philadelphia Sydrome" (some Philadelphia conspiracy), I suppose, to protect a "legend"--Hugh Wilson!
I wonder where David Moriarty was at this time. Was he even on GOLFCLUBATLAS.com at that time?
But I notice in the thread on Merion that David Moriarty started in 2006, that is now about 29 pages long, that he also says, at one point, that he thinks it's perhaps not objective, or that it can be even detrimental to research honesty, if one gets TOO CLOSE to a subject because then one has too much emotional investment in it.
But in all these threads about Merion going back over six years Wayne and I and others from Philadelphia have always said, and we continue to say today, if there is ANY real information anywhere that specifically proves Macdonald/Whigam had more influence and input into the creation of Merion than Merion gave them back in the beginning (seemingly in spades back then) and that we give them credit for today, then just show us what it is and we'd be happy to most objectively consider it.
The truth is, completely contradictory to MacWood's and then David Moriarty's insinuations about Merion and about us, if, in fact, something is found that proves that Macdonald really did have a good deal more direct input into what even the first phase of Merion was, either architecturally or even agronomically, the club, and us as well, would be more than happy to add that to the attribution and history of who created Merion East or West.
After-all, who would deny that C.B. Macdonald, in many ways, really was and should be considered "The Father" of American golf course architecture? Or, as Whigam said about him and as George Bahto borrowed for the title of his book on Macdonald, "The Evangelist of Golf", Macdonald really was in almost all ways America's first Evangelist of Golf?
Merion in no way denies that and certainly never has. Either do we. If it turns out that Macdonald actually did contribute even somewhere near as much to the creation of Merion as Wilson and his committee obviously did in working on it every day for years, I have no doubt Merion as well as us would be more than happy to give Macdonald co-equal billing and architectural attribution for Merion.
It's total speculation on my part but I have a very strong hunch that this upcoming IMO piece ("White Paper") David Moriarty is about to produce has a whole lot of Tom MacWood's active input behind it.
If that's the case and the IMO piece is going to make the point again that in their research they use logic and common-sense and we don't or that we aren't objective because we're too close to our subject and have too much of an emotional investment in it, then I suspect the discussions on here on this subject will turn towards rancor once again.
We believe in our research methods and we stand behind them unless and until someone really proves them wrong or faulty.
And I, for one, stand behind the accuracy of the reports on the creation of Merion by Hugh and Alan Wilson unless and until someone produces something that truly calls them into question---and I really do mean "truly" and not just a bunch of minicing and parsing of words and sentence structures and ship manifests and such!