A bit of obscure presidential history
Did William McKinley Die a Catholic?
For your consideration, below is my column in the current issue (June 2025) of New Oxford Review. (NB: My biography of Edward Vattmann is available on Amazon here.)
Did William McKinley Die a Catholic?
GUEST COLUMN
By James K. Hanna | June 2025
James K. Hanna is the author of The Remarkable Life of Bishop Bonaventure Broderick: Exile, Redemption, and A Gas Station (Serif Press, 2022). He is Vice President of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.
On September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, an anarchist shot President William McKinley at close range. The president was rushed to the Exposition hospital, and later to the home of Exposition official John Milburn. Soon after, Captain Edward Vattmann, 61, the Catholic chaplain at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, received an urgent message to travel to Buffalo, his presence requested by McKinley, who lay in one of Milburn’s bedrooms, wounded by the assassin’s bullet.
Fr. Vattmann immediately took a train from Chicago. If it seems odd that McKinley, known to be a devout Methodist, sent for a Catholic priest, it did not to those present at his bedside, for it was well known that he and Vattmann enjoyed a decades-long friendship.
McKinley was expected to live. As late as September 9, The New York Times reported that there was “great hope” for the president. But he soon succumbed to his wounds and died on September 14. Learning of his friend’s death, Fr. Vattmann reportedly told others, “They can do what they want with his body. I have taken care of his soul.”
Edward Vattmann was a seminarian in Prussia in 1863 when he was recruited to serve the vast number of German Catholic immigrants arriving in the midwestern United States. He reached America in 1864, at age 24, completed his education at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was ordained in St. Louis, Missouri, on Easter Sunday in 1865. Two years later, he was sent to Cleveland, Ohio, where he spent the next 23 years before joining the U.S. Army in 1890. His first assignment in Ohio was at St. Michael the Archangel Church in Findley. While there, he began a mission in the nearby town of Fostoria, where Charles Foster Sr., a local Protestant businessman, allowed him to use the parlor of his home for Sunday Mass. There Vattmann met Foster’s son Charles Jr., 42, a politician elected in 1870 to his first of four terms in Congress (he would later be elected governor).
It was through the Fosters that Fr. Vattmann met McKinley in 1878. By then he had been transferred to SS Philip and James Church in Canal Fulton, near McKinley’s hometown of Canton. McKinley, then 35, was serving his first term in Congress. Over the years he would often visit Fr. Vattmann. The record in the parish archives reads: “When McKinley visited his friend (industrialist and U.S. Senator) Mark Hanna in Cleveland, he stopped on the way back to visit his friend Father Vattmann. He used to spend quiet weekends at the rectory when he wanted to get away from the pressure of official business in Washington. He purchased a bed on which he slept on such occasions.”
One can imagine the conversations between McKinley, the Protestant lawyer-politician and Civil War veteran, and his host, the German-immigrant Catholic priest, during those many visits. McKinley’s stories of patriotism may have motivated Fr. Vattmann to seek a military chaplaincy, which McKinley helped him obtain in 1890. Vattmann’s stories of faith may have motivated McKinley to send for him when he was in critical need of pastoral care.
In 1893, 15 years after their first meeting and during McKinley’s second gubernatorial campaign, the friendship took on a particularly practical application — to the candidate’s great benefit. The anti-Catholic American Protective Association (APA), with 63,000 Ohioan members, vehemently opposed McKinley’s re-election. According to newspaper publisher H.H. Kohlsaat, in his memoir From McKinley to Harding: Personal Recollections of Our Presidents (1923), when Fr. Vattmann, then-chaplain at Fort Thomas near Cincinnati, learned of the APA threat, he responded, “Leave it to me.” Vattmann rallied bishops and clergy throughout the state to give interviews commending McKinley for his wise administration of public institutions, expressing hope that he would be re-elected. When the election was held in November, McKinley received an 81,995 plurality, winning in a landslide. Kohlsaat credits Vattmann’s efforts with McKinley’s victory. The election enhanced McKinley’s chances of earning the Republican presidential nomination in 1896. He ascended to the presidency in 1897, and his popularity in his first term assured him of re-election in 1900.
Fr. Vattmann had been stationed at Fort Sheridan near Chicago for several years when he received McKinley’s urgent request from Buffalo. His reaction to McKinley’s death, “I’ve taken care of his soul,” is legendary. The quote, repeated through the years by each succeeding pastor of SS Philip and James Church, was recently shared with me by one of those priests, 99-year-old Msgr. James Kolp. Though it may be apocryphal, there are reasons to believe that, at a minimum, Fr. Vattmann anointed McKinley with Extreme Unction. McKinley was alert the day Vattmann visited him in Buffalo. Given their friendship and the nature of his wounds, it would be reasonable for McKinley, a Christian, to ask for the anointing, and for the priest to offer it.
There is more. McKinley’s wife, Ida, insisted that Fr. Vattmann be appointed Chaplain of the Staff and deliver the benediction at her husband’s burial in Canton. Historian Edward Roe, in The Life Work of William McKinley (1901), gave this firsthand report: “The speaker was in his military uniform, and as he said the farewell words, tears flowed down his cheeks. His emotions had overmastered him. There was general grief in his voice and as he ended his invocation and went back to his seat he was completely overwhelmed with sorrow.”
Though we may never know the particulars of what took place sacramentally in the bedroom of the Milburn home in Buffalo, we can rest assured that William McKinley, in his final days, requested the ministrations of a Catholic priest, and that upon his death was buried with a final blessing at the consecrated hands of Fr. Edward Vattmann.
©2025 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
What a different timethe news article represents. A time when civil could stand on its own unlike today when civil seems irrevocably attached to disobedience, no longer describing a character trait of a person who acts out of unselfish motives.