In December 1909, the president of the United States traveled to New York City to address a black-tie dinner promoting Christian missionary work. He was there in his official capacity, and not as his country's most prominent Unitarian, a faith as controversial then as John F. Kennedy's Catholicism was half a century later. From the elegant ballroom the president made his way through a driving rainstorm to a Bowery shelter for homeless men, "which I hope will always help you and others over the hard places," William Howard Taft told its residents, "the times when the Lord and everybody seems to be against you—to help you at such times to believe that there are people in the world who sympathize with you."