John Blake Rice (28 May 1809-17 December 1874) was the Republican Mayor of Chicago from 3 May 1865 to 6 December 1869 (succeeding Francis Cornwall Sherman and preceding Roswell B. Mason) and a member of the US House of Representatives (R-IL 1) from 4 March 1873 to 17 December 1874 (succeeding Charles B. Farwell and preceding Bernard G. Caulfield).
Biography[]
John Blake Rice was born in Easton, Maryland on 28 May 1809, and he made his acting debut in Annapolis, Maryland in 1829, touring the East Coast and in the Caribbean. In 1839, he and his family moved to Buffalo, New York, managing a theater. In 1847, he went to Chicago to entertain the local politicians, and he decided to stay and establish a permanent theater. In 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, he ran for Mayor of Chicago as a conservative Republican, and he won easily with the help of the Union victory in the Civil War and a surge of Republicanism in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Rice was anti-labor, vetoing a plan to enforce an eight-hour work day, and being connected with graft, prostitution, and illegal gambling. He was defeated for a third term in 1869, and he went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1873 until his death in 1874.