Thank you for this link to the August/September 1903 Oxcam vs US matches.
The evolution of ideas that led to Golden Age was in its opening stages. In the 2008 Bob Crosby thread, he says, "people were trying not terribly successful at first - to articulate the basic organizing principles of good golf design. And the starting point for those discussions was - quite naturally the great holes...people were trying to tease out what made them (the best holes) so good."
My contention, and it is reductionistic as is all history, is that the idea stage of golf course design evolution from the penal to the strategic phase, from the Victorian to the Golden Age, started in 1903 when John Low published "Concerning Golf" and laid out the new design ideas.
Bob Crosby says, "It was a landmark book. No one before or since (my italics) has expressed so clearly and forcefully the basic principles of strategic golf design." Perhaps, the next landmark book on golf course design, "The Links," was written by Robert Hunter in 1926 at the peak of the Golden Age. According to Cutten, "In 1912, Hunter was on family trip to Britain when he met Harry Colt; who, in turn, introduced him to Alister MacKenzie. On the same trip, Robert Hunter invested six important months in studying the great courses of the British Isles."
John Low and Harry Colt were as close as brothers. There was nobody Colt respected more than Low. If John Low was the father of the idea stage of the Golden Age, Harry Colt was the father of the golf course architecture phase of the Golden Age. CB Macdonald was the father too, but as you know I am working on the Colt case!
Many of the 1903 Oxcam amateur golfers were the very same architects who won away the top architectural jobs from the penal-style professionals when the business of building new courses started back up in the British Isles later in the decade. These Oxcam architects were new wave and fundamentally Low-inspired. The relationship between the British and the Americans was extremely contentious in the years 1903 to 1910. In 1904, one year after the 1903 Oxcam trip to the U.S., Walter Travis won the Amateur Championship. Travis felt he had been shabbily treated at Sandwich. Darwin later called Travis "a rat in a cage." The contentiousness of 1903 turned into a full-blown American-British feud.
During the 1903 matches, The American editor of Golf, van Tassel Stuphen, was incensed at Horace Hutchinson for claiming that the Americans didn't show the proper sportsmanship. The British claimed the Americans were too serious and competitive with a lack of spirit for playing the game for the game's sake. Stuphen was also "apparently...imbued with some pretty heavy national pride" and felt the Oxcam players were unfairly chosen and far more experienced than the Americans. The British said they brought in a team that did not include their top amateurs, such as Ball and Hilton.The British trounced the Americans hurting their national pride. A few months later, in Golf Magazine, JAT Bramston of the Oxcam team presented a balanced but quite critical report on the American courses the team had played on and identified Myopia as the "finest wine." Sven posted the article above.
The bad feelings were still not resolved in 1910, seven years later, when the final stages of Travis' grudge battle over the Schenectady putter came to a head. The argument divided the Americans and broke up the friendship between Travis and CB Macdonald. Based on a January 1911 newspaper article posted by Mike Cirba in GCA, at the "sensational" annual USGA meeting, the delegates worked out a compromise agreeing to adhere to the R&A rules of golf without the rule on the "form and make" of clubs, which allowed use of the Schenectady putter in the U.S.. At the meeting, before the official board debate about the putter, the slate of officers was "rushed through" and Silas Strawn of Chicago was elected president.
Earlier, in the "room where it happened" at a luncheon in the office of Silas Strawn, the lawyer, the compromise was worked out. My speculation about what happened is this: Led by Silas Strawn, Chicago and Western delegates joined with Travis-led Easterners in a majority coalition and agreed to support Travis' position on the putter and to elect Strawn without any debate. Travis felt vindicated, though it seems like he never gave up his grudge for the British. CB Macdonald was enraged. Again, he was thwarted: he was not elected president, and not even as an element of the compromise. The board did line the resolution with statements of reliance on the R&A as the ruling body of golf.
In the official board meeting, the Garden City delegate, perhaps a Travis ally, put up a public show of support for CB Macdonald's position to adhere to the R&A rules and the Chicago delegate from Homewood provided a rationale for the board not to ban the Schenectady putter. Macdonald had spent his life building relationships in the British Isles and with the members of the R&A. In a few years, it would be time to put aside toxic nationalism and petty argument.
Is it possible that the enmity between American and British golfers that started up in the 1903 Oxcam matches and that broke into open recrimination during the 1904 Amateur Championship, never dissipated from 1905 to 1907 and turned into a flat-out war from 1908 to 1911 over the Schenectady putter? Was CB Macdonald, who perhaps was more of a diplomat than he is given credit for, the one left holding the bag to smooth over the damage with the R&A and the Oxcam community? Who were the allies of Walter Travis? Perhaps, Donald Ross and H.H. Barker, and many others, in the golf professional world. As Ross and Barker sought to build their careers into golf courses, Walter Travis was an essential connector because of the marketing value of his publication, American Golfer. Who were the most powerful amateurs in the East on Travis' side?
In this era, identities were so tribal and the divisions so intense. I was reading a history of Onwentsia and the author, David Sweet, quotes Hobart Chatfield-Taylor who wrote, "That year of '96 (1896) was, in the parlance of the streets, the 'fiercest' year golf has known in the West. 'Chicago Society' was divided by the rival camps of 'Wheaton' and "Onwentsia.'...feelings rans so high that families were divided, and the members of the rival clubs were scarcely on speaking terms." They were competing for the golf championship of the West.The lines between people in the golf world, the splits and feuds, and the fierce competition was everywhere, and it wasn't just on the golf course.
Amateur vs Professional: This split didn't begin to heal until Walter Hagen and Inverness in 1920. Chick Evans and Francis Ouimet who grew up as caddies were caught in the middle and fought their entire lives for their amateur status and dignity. The savage wrangle over the definition of an amateur and a professional carried on for years.
England vs Scotland: In his new book, Stephen Proctor reverently describes how John Ball's wins in 1890 brought this golf rivalry of the 1880s and 1890s to a head.
England vs U.S.: The 1903 Oxcam visit, Travis' 1904 win, and the Schenectady putter controversy.
North America vs British Isles: Ouimet's win was as monumental in 1913 as John Ball's in 1890.
East vs West and the USGA vs the WGA. CB Macdonald vs Walter Travis. Walter Travis vs Devereaux Emmet. Walter Travis vs Max Behr. American Golfer vs Golf Illustrated. It seems like it was the competitive and wildly obstinate expat, Walter Travis, who owned the bully pulpit, American Golfer, not CB MacDonald, the USGA's diplomat to the R&A, who always fought the hardest and was the most unrelenting.