Bryan,
I am fine with you not being convinced. Given the burden of proof you require of me, I am not counting on convincing you. Convincing you or any other "jury" was never my goal. Besides, the burden of proof you are requiring is much more demanding than would be required by any jury.
What surprises me about your approach is what seems to me to be a double standard, where you impose almost impossible burden of proof on me, but comparatively lax standards for you and others. For example above you note that I cannot say "with certainty that [my] theories are the truth." Of course I can't! That is the nature of historical analysis.
But while you hold me to this impossible standard, you and others go on loosely speculating about all sorts of things, none of which you can say with certainty. For example, you seem to think that it was Wilson's committee who came up with the five plans or iterations? You cannot say this with any degree of certainty, and I think it extremely unlikely, yet it is apparently good enough for you.
But maybe I just misunderstood your methodology. I thought you were actually trying to figure out which among the various theories is
most reasonable and is most likely to have happened. Yet your approach seems to be very similar to that of Jeff Brauer and Mike Cirba. You all seem to think that if you can conceive of any sort of alternative theory - no matter how unlikely - then my theory must fail. In other words, my burden is to prove my theory as an absolutely certainty --you state as much above. Yet your own burden seems to be that of mere possibility.
As for your questions about the various committees, I don't have that in front of me right now. We know the members of Wilson's Construction Committee. Lesley was not among them. Somewhere I have the identity of Lesley's Committee, and Wilson was not a member. I don't recall offhand if the Golf Committee and what you call the Golf Grounds Committee were the same. Lloyd was on both Wilson's Committee and Lesley's Committee.
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Jeff Brauer wrote:
But mostly, why should anyone substitute either their own judgement 100 years later, or word parsing of old articles that have nothing to do with MCC when the club records and many other articles over time show exactly what happened? Why would Hugh Wilson in his Piper article not tell committees to hire CBM if they were going to design a course, rather than say they should visit the National? Why would CBM NOT claim credit for designing Merion in Scotland's Gift?
One of the big fictions around here is that, 100 years ago, Merion credited Hugh Wilson and not CBM as designer of the course. This was not the case. Brauer, the Philadelphia Posse, and even many legitimate historians had misread the record for years as if this is what it said, but it does not. Take the Hugh Wilson chapter for example, long misinterpreted as being about preparation for the trip abroad until I set the straight. Or take the Lesley report, twisted by them to diminish CBM's contribution when the article itself does nothing of the sort. Or take the Alan Wilson document, where
Wayne and TEPaul went so far as to doctor their presentation of the text to hide the extent of the CBM and HJW's involvement in the design process. The reality is that Wilson and his Committee were not singled out for design credit over CBM and HJW. All of the early accounts - including Merion's Board Minutes - highlight CBM and HJW's contributions - but few even mention Wilson.
I keep asking them for a list of these early sources that single out Wilson and his Committee for design credit over CBM and HJW, but none has been forthcoming, and none will be because such documents do not exist. CBM is mentioned again and again during the PLANNING, in the press and in Merion's internal administrative records, but not Wilson.
My judgment, 100 years later, is entirely consistent with Hugh Wilson's words, and Robert Lesley's, and Whigham's, and with Alan Wilson's. It is Brauer, Cirba, and their cronies who have to discount and twist the words of these men to make their case! They are the ones who won't take the words of those who were there! \\
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Cirba asks
"who has ever argued that the amateur sportsmen at Merion weren't directly inspired by what the amateur sportsmen at NGLA (Macdonald, Whigham, Emmet, Travis) did, and looked to emulate their efforts? Has he forgotten the past many years? His posts do not deserve addressing.