Mike,
You again underestimate the impact of CBM, M&W, and NGLA. And, without even attempting to understand the context you dismiss his comments as sycophantic butt kissing, pure hyperbole, remarkably erroneous, and nonsense. This speaks loudly to your inability to look at this stuff with any semblance of objectivity or reasonableness, but it says little about the validity of HJW's statement.
Here is the passage immediately before the one I quoted above:
"For National has been much more than just a good golf course: it has been the inspiration of every great course in this country, though plenty of them will not show a trace of the Macdonald style. Take MacKenzie's Cypress Point . . . ."
I'd say that is an at least arguably accurate statement, as accurate as such indeterminate statements can be.
Like it or not Mike, CBM and his golf course revolutionized the they we approached golf design in America. He may not have invented the game of golf, but he, Whigham, and NGLA went a long ways toward popularizing golf architecture as we now know it. Beginning with NGLA, we thought of golf and golf architecture differently. Even some of the courses you named went through dramatic revisions after NGLA.
I'm not downplaying the importance of other figures but at least as far as changing the way we looked at the entire endeavor, M&W cleared the path.
Here is an anecdotal example that I stumbled across recently; Perry Maxwell and Prairie Dunes, Southern Hills, Dornick Hills, Old Town, Greens at Crystal Downs, greens and work at Augusta, etc. As far as I know his style has little or nothing to do with CBM's nor have I ever seen his name anywhere under Macdonald's in the golf design family tree, nor should it necessarily be there.
Yet guess how Perry Maxwell got his start? He was living in Oklahoma and had never seen a golf course when he and his wife read H.J. Whigham's article in Scribner's Magazine on the creation of NGLA:
Reading an article in Scribner's Magazine, written by Mr. H. W. Whigham on the establishment of the National Golf Course near Southampton, Long Island, in this out-of-the-way place in Oklahoma I said I thought golf was just a game for the effete, and I wondered if it was possible to have a golf course in our part of the world. That article was very attractively written, and described the National Golf Course from a landscape standpoint as well as a test of golf. My wife was the artist of the family. It was she who found this article, and she said, "I wonder if that thing could be adapted to this section of the country. We have a beautiful piece of ground out north of our city, and Iwonder if it could be adapted to golf?" I do not think either of us had ever seen a golf course before.
Did CBM design Prairie Dunes? Of course not. Did M&W revolutionize the way we view golf course design and inspire Perry Maxwell to take up the game and the pursuit of design? Sure sounds like it to me.