Sven,
While Bendelow may lead in total number of courses, I suspect that the vast number of them weren't much architecturally, true? I realize that he did more sophisticated work when budget and land and intent were sufficient. I've probably played as many or more of Alex Findlay courses as anyone and he was quite good at his best, but also did a number of early primitive courses. However, to your overall point, as Findlay himself may have said, "there is glory for all".
Here in his own words is a brief essay on the origins of golf in the US.
http://alexanderfindlay.com/articles/golf.in_the_beginning_in_the_united_states/
Mike:
You're talking about a design career that spanned over 40 years, from the very early rudimentary designs to much more nuanced work like Olympia Fields South and Medinah. To dismiss any of this work as "not much architecturally" is akin to looking at early artwork and noting that it wasn't important because it didn't look like a Monet.
Its tough to make a statement about the quality of any of those early guy’s courses, mostly because the bulk of their work was done prior to 1920 (Bendelow's total count is probably well over 700, having done around 550 by 1913 or so). Many of those early course aren’t around any more, and many of them were altered later on as the game changed and architectural style evolved along with it. The difference between what clubs wanted (and what guys were designing) in 1898 (to use a random date) and 1923 is staggering, the game had changed immensely.
With respect to Bendelow in particular, some of his ideas were ahead of their time, including building courses at lengths that hadn’t been seen before in an effort to get ahead of the changes in the ball and the oncoming onslaught on distance. His East Lake design was revolutionary for this reason. He is often given the bad rap of being an adherent to the geometric school of design, which he and everyone else was during the early days. But his work evolved to a more natural style over the years, even though today this isn’t appreciated.
Bendelow was not Ross or MacDonald or Tillinghast, although he was asked to bid on many of the same projects. His focus was on expanding golf to cities and towns where it was not being played (you could argue this was due to his ties to the sporting goods companies, but I believe his intentions were greater than just selling clubs and balls). Often this meant dealing with a club that did not have the deep pockets that would allow for the creation of a masterpiece. To label him a simplistic designer is a misnomer, he was just as capable of doing a simple plan with construction instructions as he was a multi-month on the ground effort.
I'm curious to know what Findlay courses you've played you'd consider to be his best. I have a modicum of experience with his courses (I've played Walnut Lane and Paxon Hollow over 50 times, grew up sneaking on to Springhaven on caddie days and have seen a handful of his other courses, most of which appear to have received significant updates). I have no reason to think that Findlay at his best was any better than Bendelow's greatest efforts.
If anything, I'd think that the reputations of both Findlay and Bendelow suffer from the same fate, their importance has been overshadowed by those that came later.
Sven
PS - I'm still curious to know exactly when Findlay was supposedly spreading the game across the country. The early attempts to play golf in the midwest and west noted in the article Bret linked to are no measure to the amount of work done by Bendelow between 1901 and 1913 throughout those regions of the country.