This is a good thread, Mike C - especially for what it's trying to grapple with. And to me, what it's really trying to grapple with is the definition of great (and lasting) architecture and the nature of architecture's strategic (and fundamental) principles.
David - First off, I know I can fall into rhetorical flourishes now and again, but geez, your post to me was an education in that regard. Second, I am trying (if very slowly and un-systematically) to read the historical record, and when something strikes me or I've reached a tentative conclusion, I come on here and think out loud, on the page.
Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees, or you are, or we both are. At the very least, we may have very different ideas about what the term "strategic principles of good architecture" means in this context. I think Sean and Philip and TE have all captured some of what I'm trying to get at.
Was Macdonald hugely INFLUENTIAL? Yes, for many reasons and in many ways. If I've not understood or agreed to that before now, I've been wrong. But note: what got me to comment on this thread in the first place was something you wrote early on, i.e. that Macdonald was "importing the strategic principles of design" to America. Now, those are not necessarily the same thing, are they? That the forms of and rigour with which those principles manifested themselves at NLGA were (justifiably) the talk of the town does not mean that the principles themselves were not understood by many an expert, or that without a Macdonald they would never have been expressed. Does it?
What ARE those strategic principles? (That's a genuine question). Didn't Old Tom Morris near the end of his days have some idea of those principles? Didn't he transit those ideas? Weren't the array of experts who responded to that Macdonald "survey" on great/ideals holes aware of the principles that underpinned those golf holes? Didn't Ross, Fowler, Colt etc know about them? Does the fact that Macdonald was the one who tried to hit a home run with an ideal golf course -- and that he had the clout and the ambition and talent to pull it off -- mean that more modest or less high profile attempts (constrained/limited by a variety of factors) disregarded those principles?
If you are arguing that Macdonald was the father of American golf course architecture, I'd say that was a handy and serviceable theory. I spent some time writing television biographies -- I tried first to get the subject's life history correct, and then to create a compelling narrative around the subject's significance by developing a serviceable theory, i.e. one that I believed in and that could be reasonably argued and maintained...but one that, years later, I sometimes found lacked nuance, or that diminished the lives and works of the subject's contemporaries. That's all I'm saying, David - i.e. that assigning Macdonald a preeminent role in the history of golf course architecture is a serviceable theory, but that -- even just intuitively -- it strikes me as one that lacks nuance...
Peter