But the appearance of Roosevelt before such an investigating body
invariably resulted in a "bully time" for him and a peculiarly
disconcerting time for his opponents.

One of the Republican floor leaders in the House in those days
was Congressman Grosvenor from Ohio. In an unwary moment Mr.
Grosvenor attacked the Commission on the floor of the House in
picturesque fashion. Roosevelt promptly asked that Mr. Grosvenor
be invited to meet him before a congressional committee which was
at that moment investigating the activities of the Commission.
The Congressman did not accept the invitation until he heard that
Roosevelt was leaving Washington for his ranch in the West. Then
he notified the committee that he would be glad to meet
Commissioner Roosevelt at one of its sessions. Roosevelt
immediately postponed his journey and met him. Mr. Grosvenor,
says Roosevelt in his Autobiography, "proved to be a person of
happily treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of
arranging his statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to
confusion." He declared to the committee, for instance, that he
did not want to repeal the Civil Service Law and had never said
so. Roosevelt produced one of Mr. Grosvenor's speeches in which
he had said, "I will not only vote to strike out this provision,
but I will vote to repeal the whole law." Grosvenor declared that
there was no inconsistency between these two statements. At
another point in his testimony, he asserted that a certain
applicant for office, who had, as he put it, been fraudulently
credited to his congressional district, had never lived in that
district or in Ohio, so far as he knew. Roosevelt brought forth a
letter in which the Congressman himself had categorically stated
that the man in question was not only a legal resident of his