"I know he [Horace Hutchinson] impressed on me that the human mind could not devise undulations superior to those of nature, saying that if I wished to make undulations on the greens to take a number of pebbles in my hand and drop them on a miniature space representing a putting green on a small scale and as they dropped on the diagram, place the undulations according to their fall. This I did for some of the National greens where I had no copies of the original undulations which nature had made on the great greens of the world." --Charles Blair Macdonald
This was the first thing I laid my eyes on when I opened my copy of "The Evangelist of Golf" today. I can pretty much guarantee I wouldn't have gotten something as good if I'd opened "Scotland's Gift" to a random page. I was already thinking that Ryan was being overly dismissive of the amount of creativity and new thinking that CBM and his mates must have needed to bring the best of the templates out on sites as diverse as Yale, Mid-Ocean, Chicago, NGLA, etc., etc.
Luckily, of course, we have none other than Tom Doak engaged in this very process as we speak!
The funny thing about this thread is that I sincerely wonder if Ryan would have a different take on CBM if he'd read George Bahto's book first instead of "Scotland's Gift." That's the great thing about history--with the benefit of the passage of time, the intermediary, the historian, culls the source material in search of the most valuable (and accessible!) fragments that can be passed along to the reader/student.
In many cases this degree of separation is needed to get the desired perspective on a subject. We're all the star of our own show, and it's not easy to take a step back and talk about your life or your career without sounding like a twit--especially if you've been successful, as then you run the risk of sounding grandiose. This is the case whether you're a good writer or not, and this is why biographies are frequently (though not always) more useful than autobiographies.
This thread has a lot to do with history and how we engage with it, how our encounters with different texts can set the tone for subsequent readings. We're fortunate to be able to have the conversation, though, in terms of measuring the ideas alongside their finished works. It's harder with George Thomas, and impossible with Max Behr.
Anyway, I hope all of this hasn't just been a roundabout way of agreeing with the title of this thread! But I really do think Bahto's book is utterly essential not just to understanding Macdonald's architecture, but to understanding the origins of golf in America.