Kamala Harris made news recently when she turned down Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s invitation to appear at the annual Al Smith Dinner, which will be held on October 17 at the New York Hilton in Manhattan. Some say that Harris’s move was a slight against Catholics and a sign of her insecurity about how she would be received or about her ability to deliver a good-natured speech. Others defend the vice president’s decision not to appear on the dais with Donald Trump, given his treatment of Hillary Clinton at the 2016 dinner.
Whatever the merits of Harris’s decision, it raises the question of why, during most presidential election years, attention turns to a white-tie dinner in Manhattan named for a long-dead presidential candidate and featuring prominent politicians, businessmen and women, and media figures.
The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner has taken place every year since 1945. Named for the beloved New York governor and first Catholic major-party presidential nominee, the dinner was the brainchild of Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967 and by far the most influential American bishop in the nation’s history. The Al Smith Dinner that he inaugurated would annually bring together America’s political, business, and military elite to raise money for various Catholic charities. The cardinal had connections across each of those sectors, and his “powerhouse,” as the chancery was known, represented the height of Catholic power and influence in America.
Most of the early Al Smith Dinners featured New York politicians and military figures. Dwight Eisenhower made two appearances and Richard Nixon made one, giving the early Cold War dinners a decidedly Republican bent. The event included both presidential candidates for the first time in 1960, when Nixon and John F. Kennedy attended amid a tight race that featured debates over whether a Catholic (JFK) could lead the country. Kennedy, who had spoken at the 1959 dinner, initially felt reluctant to make a return appearance in an election year, fearing that it might hurt his chances.
Earlier in the campaign, Kennedy had declared that, were he elected president, he would not take orders from bishops or the pope. It was smart politics, but Kennedy’s remarks put some distance between himself and most American bishops. Ironically, Spellman felt that he would have greater access to a White House of the Quaker Nixon than that of the Catholic Kennedy. Spellman’s quarter-century friendship with Joseph Kennedy ended bitterly over the 1960 campaign, as the Kennedy family believed that the cardinal was quietly backing Nixon for president and using the Al Smith Dinner to help his campaign.
Eventually, however, after hemming and hawing over Spellman’s invitation—and apparently trying to get the cardinal to invite the vice presidential candidates instead—JFK agreed to appear.
Spellman himself was ambivalent about Kennedy’s appearance. “I would not have been displeased if he declined the invitation,” he told a friend, “but he would have been foolish had he done so.”
Despite the back-stage controversy, however, the dinner went off smoothly, and Spellman later said that it “was and will be the greatest dinner of the series.” The cardinal beamed for photographs with the two presidential candidates, Nixon in white tie and tails, Kennedy in a simple tuxedo with black tie. The cardinal showed no partiality that night. Both Nixon and Kennedy were “men of goodwill,” he assured the crowd, “endowed with brilliant minds and the ability to face and solve crises.”
For all his ambivalence, Kennedy came prepared with the night’s best lines. Now that he had appeared at the Al Smith Dinner, he said, he expected an invitation to a Quaker dinner honoring Herbert Hoover. Only Cardinal Spellman, JFK continued, was “so widely respected in American politics” that he could bring together two politicians “who are increasingly apprehensive about the November election, who have long eyed each other suspiciously and who have disagreed so strongly both publicly and privately.” Kennedy then delivered the punchline: he was referring not to himself and Nixon but to Nixon and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who also was in attendance.
The dinner’s underlying theme was that religion should play no role in the upcoming election. Though Kennedy acquitted himself well, the well-heeled, mostly Catholic audience favored Nixon over their co-religionist. This proved a sore spot for the Democrat, who later told Arthur Schlesinger that the pro-Nixon biases of the dinner guests irritated him. “‘It all goes to show,” the silver-spooned Kennedy said, “that, when the chips are down, money counts more than religion.”
Even after 1960, many election-year dinners would not see the two main candidates for the White House. In 1964, Spellman pointedly declined to invite Barry Goldwater, extending the offer only to Lyndon Johnson. The evangelical Jimmy Carter joined Ronald Reagan at the New York dinner in 1980, but Walter Mondale turned down the invite in 1984, reflecting tensions within the Democratic Party over abortion. In 1996, John Cardinal O’Connor invited neither Bob Dole nor Bill Clinton, because of the latter’s stance on late-term abortions; the vice presidential candidates, Al Gore and Jack Kemp, were featured instead. Similarly, in 2004, the archdiocese invited neither George W. Bush nor John Kerry, likely because of the Catholic Kerry’s support for abortion rights.
Turning down an invite to the Al Smith Dinner generally hasn’t helped candidates. When Adlai Stevenson rejected Spellman’s offer to appear in 1956, it hurt the Democrat with Catholic voters. Back then, the Catholic vote was still solidly Democratic, as in Al Smith’s day. With greater postwar affluence and strong anti-Communist feeling, however, it became increasingly conservative.
Today, it’s hard to pinpoint a uniform “Catholic vote,” as any effort to do so must reflect the varying views of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholics, as well as those of regular churchgoers and cultural Catholics. This makes it hard to estimate how much Harris’s absence at this year’s Al Smith Dinner will hurt her in November, if at all.
As for Donald Trump, who knows what he will say this time? As Kennedy showed in 1960, sticking with the dinner’s tradition of light, self-deprecating humor is the wisest strategy, but that is not Trump’s preferred operating mode.
The Al Smith Dinner is a relic of a bygone era in New York history. The event still sells out and attracts big names from the American establishment, particularly in election years, and it still raises millions of dollars to fund the archdiocese’s good works. But the dinner is a long way from its heyday, when it symbolized Cold War America in an era when the Catholic Church was the dominant institution in New York City, its influence reaching to mayoral appointments, the NYPD, and even the kinds of movies that could be shown.
Today, the Church’s political influence in New York and the nation at large barely registers by comparison. Relics nonetheless have their place, and the Al Smith Dinner reminds us of a different time in New York’s history and of a courtly tradition between rivals that, in our deeply polarized political environment, has all but disappeared. Harris’s decision not to appear on the dais with Trump undermines what’s left of that tradition, and our politics are worse for it.
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