Background
Charles Allen Thorndike Rice was born on June 18, 1851 in Boston, the son of Henry Gardner and Elizabeth Francis (Thorndike) Rice. His father was derived from an ancient family of Brookfield, Massachussets; his mother was seventh in descent from John Thorndike of Ipswich, Massachussets, who arrived in America in 1633, and a grand-daughter of Israel Thorndike of Beverly and Boston. When Rice was still very young, his parents separated, the mother obtaining a divorce in Indiana and the father another in Maryland. In 1860, the father having come north with the son for the summer, the mother sought to obtain his custody. When the Massachusetts supreme judicial court denied her right, she caused the boy to be seized while in school at Nahant and after some perilous adventures made her way to Europe with him. The "kidnapping" became a celebrated case, and in the trial of the actual abductors Henry Cabot Lodge, then a lad of eleven and one of "Charley" Rice's playmates, was the principal witness. Mrs. Rice later settled in Germany and there married one of her son's tutors, Dr. Frederick Koffler, an excellent scholar, of Darmstadt.
Education
In 1870 Rice matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, receiving the degree of B. A. in 1874 and the degree of M. A. in 1878. His close friend and college roommate, Lloyd Bryce, said that "he took the highest possible degrees in the shortest possible time. " After Oxford he spent some part of a year at the Columbia Law School in New York.
Career
Possessed of ample means, he decided upon the profession of journalism, and almost immediately, taking what has been called "the most distinctive step in his career" (Bryce, post), he purchased in 1876 the North American Review at that time a stodgy quarterly, profitable to neither publishers, editors, nor contributors. He at once announced his intention to make the magazine "an arena wherein any man having something valuable to say could be heard. " He removed the Review from Boston to New York, made it a monthly, and filled it with timely articles on public questions by leaders of world opinion.
John Sherman and Hugh McCulloch wrote for him on specie payments; James G. Blaine, James A. Garfield, and Wade Hampton on negro franchise; Robert G. Ingersoll and William E. Gladstone on the Christian religion. He himself went afield in quest of material, as when he interviewed President Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad amidst the rioting of the Pittsburgh strike in 1877. In a few years the periodical became world famous, returning an annual profit of $50, 000 from an original investment of a tenth of that sum. The editor meantime multiplied his interests.
In 1879 he induced Pierre Lorillard and the French government to finance the Charnay expedition for study of the Mayan ruins in Central America and Mexico. In 1884 he acquired an interest in Le Matin in Paris. The next year he edited a well-known volume of Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln (1886), and in 1886 he came within 527 votes of election to Congress as a Republican from a strongly Democratic district. Treachery defeated him and brought him forward as an advocate of ballot reform.
In 1889 President Harrison appointed him minister to Russia, perhaps the youngest American since John Quincy Adams to receive a diplomatic mission of such rank, but on the eve of his departure for this post Rice died very suddenly in New York City.
Personality
He was handsome and of fascinating personality, enterprising and versatile, a good linguist, admirably equipped for journalism.
