Jim Kennedy:
"Any golfer conversant with the golf courses abroad and the best we have in America, which are generally conceded to be Garden City, Myopia, and the Chicago Golf Club, knows that in America as yet we have no first class golf course comparable with the classic golf courses of Great Britain and Ireland."
C.B. Macdonald, 1904
We also know what his opinion of Merion East and Pine Valley was because we have those quotations of his. We can also be pretty confident of his opinion of NGLA.
All the products of those so-called amateur/sportsman architects!
As a precursor to all this he wrote in 1897:
“The ideal first class golf links has yet to be selected and the course laid out in America…….a first-class course can only be made in time. It must develop. The proper distance between the holes, the shrewd placing of bunkers and other hazards, the perfecting of putting greens, all must evolve by a process of growth and it requires study and patience.”
And later on the state of most early American golf architecture:
"It makes the very soul of golf shriek."
What he wrote was the method of study, evolution, and patience utilized by those famous amateur/sportsmen architects of that early time mentioned with their years long "special" projects---eg Leeds (Myopia), Emmet/Travis (GCGC), the Fownses (Oakmont), NGLA, Wilson (Merion East) and Crump (Pine Valley) and not their counterparts of that time who were generally multi-tasking professional golfer/golf teacher/club-maker/greenkeeper/part time architects who were generally in and out of those early projects in a day or two with minimal pay!
He was there, that's for sure and consequently I figure he probably knew a whole lot more about what was going on back then than you and that other delusional character you just addressed your last post to. I'd prefer to take his word for it and his opinion on it rather than yours. But hey, that's just me, I guess. Anyone on here is certainly welcome to their own opinion about it no matter what it is; no big deal really; it's only the factual history of early American golf course architecture!