Micah:
No, I'm not joking. Don't forget that golf agronomy before and around 1910 was unbelievably rudimentary (unknown really) compared to the way we look at it and think of it today.
Macdonald at NGLA had massive problems with his course's agronomy in the very beginning, primarily because he knew no better than to try to grow grass on basically straight sand (no mixed growing medium and water retention medium).
Mcdonald was the first to get in touch with US Dept of Agriculture forage and agricultural crop specialists Piper and Oakley. Piper and Oakley were forage and crop specialist, not golf agronomists. One called himself a botanist and later the other called himself an "agrostologist"
In their business of forage and crop specialization for the US Dept of Agriculture they were liberal liming recommenders as a way of sweetening soil to encourage things to grow, particularly crops. Piper and Oakley had not dealt in golf agronomic research before this because it virtually was non-existent in America at that time.
Piper and Oakley, like Macdonald and later Hugh Wilson of Merion and Crump of PVGC in conjunction with them had never dealt in golf agronomics primarily because it basically didn't exist in any type of experimental or scientific way.
What they recommended between around 1908 and 1921 as to the effect or use of liming may've been quite different and probably was. Early golf agronomy students such as Michael Hurzdan certainly believe they all used perhaps too much liming until scientific analysis proved using less was better for golf agronomics.
We have perhaps 2000 letters between Hugh and Alan Wilson of Merion and Piper and Oakley that span between 1911 and the year Wilson died in 1925 and the the difference of opinion over that time on the use of liming golf soil for effective golf agronomics can be seen.
It's pretty obvious in the beginning they were simply trying to get multiple strains of grass to grow for golf and that later they were beginning to understand they were getting too many things to grow that was competing with acceptable golf grass primarily the strains of bents they were beginning to develop themselves. (in the early years the seed merhants were packaging all kinds of seed into their seed bags probably in some sort of Darwinian logic.
Later Piper and Oakley and the other early experimenters found that they did not need of want this type of competition amongst various types of seed.