Trump Roasts Hillary Clinton At Al Smith Dinner 19 days before the 2016 general election. The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, commonly known as the Al Smith Dinner, is an annual white tie dinner in New York City to raise funds for Catholic charities supporting children of various needs in the Archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Francis Spellman founded and hosted the first dinner in 1945 after Smith's death the previous year. By 1960, the Al Smith dinner had become a "ritual of American politics", in the words of Theodore H. White. It is generally the last event at which the two major party presidential candidates share a stage before the election.