The Converted

On a Saturday afternoon, James R. Salzmann '02 sits down to brunch in pressed khakis, a button-down shirt, and a cable-knit sweater--hardly the expected image of a former president of the Perspective, Harvard's liberal campus monthly magazine.

But Salzmann is hardly your average Perspective editor. He wants to be an investment banker. And he's voting for George W. Bush for president come November.

After years of working for Democratic causes in his hometown of Sea Gert, N.J. and then at Harvard, Salzmann says he has now come to appreciate conservatism.

"I think I've always been less liberal than I thought I was," Salzmann says. "Arguing the opposite of things [at Perspective], I started to see the logic behind the conservative viewpoint."

For Salzmann, a year in Social Analysis 10: The Principals of Economics and a paper on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's economic program provided a political epiphany.

But ironically, the history and literature concentrator also credits his experiences at Perspective with his recent revelation. This fall, Salzmann resigned the journal's presidency after his political conversion.

Facing liberals, communists and socialists at weekly staff dinners, at which conversations about the Wall Street job market were inevitable, Salzmann says he was left to defend the Harvard students who "sell their souls."

As Salzmann realized he was defending his own career goals--he's worked as a finance intern for the Cambridge-based telecommunications firm TCN since September--he became more disillusioned with the staff viewpoint.

"Communism and Goldman Sachs don't mix too well," he says.

Salzmann says Perspective's staff knew of his developing political positions when he assumed the presidency.

"I think everyone on the staff knew that by the time I was elected president I was the most conservative on the paper," he says.

By the middle of last year, Salzmann was an anomaly at Perspective meetings. Though socially liberal (pro-choice, anti-school prayer), he had become decidedly conservative on economic issues.

And when the staff returned to school this past September to face its own financial troubles, the split between Salzmann's views and the staff's became problematic. Salzmann suggested scaling back the magazine's frequency of publication, using black and white instead of color on the pages, or changing the tabloid's format.

"All of my suggestions were routinely shot down as being detrimental to the liberal voice of Harvard," he says. "I was fighting to save something that I didn't agree with."

Magazine staff members say Salzmann was in a particularly difficult position because of his political beliefs. But they argue that, despite Salzmann's own personal economic goals, he failed to turn the ailing magazine around. After Salzmann's resignation, Ethan D.S. Ard '00 took over the presidency. Ard, staffers agree, was a better match for a liberal publication.

When Salzmann's parents heard that their son had changed political camps, they were overjoyed.

"My mother is so relieved....She said, 'Your grandparents would be jumping in their graves.' They're so happy," he says.

Salzmann says his liberal views originated at the dinner table at home, as an unconscious backlash against his parents' economically conservative beliefs.

"I supposed I inadvertently and probably slightly purposely tried to make him cynical," says Walter J. Salzmann, a retired plumbing contractor-turned-private investor.

Salzmann joined his town's Democratic Club, which routinely lost every election and worked on local Democratic campaigns as a self-described mainstream liberal.

High school friends were shocked to learn of a democrat in their midst.

"Back home," Salzmann recalls, "you didn't have to be very liberal to be considered a radical liberal."

But according to James Stigliano, a local Democrat who Salzmann helped in a failed bid for a spot on township committee, Salzmann wasn't an average liberal even in high school

"He was a shirt-and-tie type of kid, with short hair," Stigliano says. "His appearance was absolutely conservative."

While Salzmann says he feels uneasy about supporting agendas that include socially conservative ideas, he's pinning his hopes on Bush's "compassionate conservatism." And economic issues remain a top priority for the newly minted Republican.

"Yes, I think it's personally selfish," he says. "[But] when people act in their own self interest, they end up doing what's economically best for everyone in the long-run."