Contrasting Views of the American Dream

The Austrian bodybuilder and the grandson of Greek immigrants are self-made men, millionaires both, the embodiment of the ambitions of most who venture here. But as they seek the governorship, the personalities and experiences of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides have led them to far different views about the appropriate role of government in Californians’ lives.

Schwarzenegger tells the story of his arrival in America as if he were Horatio Alger -- a solitary man who found unrivaled success on his own, even if his way was, in reality, smoothed by the generosity of friends.

“When I came to California with absolutely nothing, I only had a dream and a gym bag in my hand and $20. That’s all I had. And because of California, I could make a successful life,” the Republican governor told a crowd in San Diego not long ago.

Angelides’ story may lack the immediate drama of Schwarzenegger’s, but in three generations here the struggles of his family and the salvation they found in hard times forged a lasting view of government as protector.

“It isn’t a matter of whether you are willing to work hard enough; it’s whether you get breaks along the way,” Angelides, a Democrat, recalls being told by his father.

If they represent the orthodoxy of their political parties, it is true that Angelides and Schwarzenegger also echo the contradictions many Americans hold about chasing the American dream.

Heather Johnson, a sociology professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said that in her research with hundreds of families, Americans have shown a remarkable ability to hold two contradictory thoughts: They revere the notion of individual success, but recognize that even the most capable may need help along the way.

“The Republicans are playing to one side of it and the Democrats are playing to the other, but they are going to capture a very large audience either way,” said Johnson, author of “The American Dream and the Power of Wealth,” which examines 200 families of all income groups. “What is so fascinating is we all believe in both arguments even if they are in conflict with one another.”

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Schwarzenegger came to America in 1968, a turbulent year of assassinations and civil unrest. He worked his way through community colleges and night classes, and embraced the Republican Party after watching the campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey.

Speaking at the GOP convention in 2004, Schwarzenegger said that he liked Nixon’s emphasis on “free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes and strengthening the military.”

But his views may have been formed much earlier, given his lifelong belief in the primacy of the individual. In his autobiography, “The Education of a Bodybuilder,” he wrote that he disliked soccer because it was a team sport and “I didn’t get personal recognition.”

He frequently looks back to his childhood, he said in an interview with The Times, and says it instilled in him “that spirit of will, the willingness to struggle and go beyond.”

“I grew up after the Second World War in Austria, where we had no food, where there was struggle, where there was misery, poverty, food stamps and all that kind of a thing, where my mother had to go from farm to farm to just get enough butter for the week for the children, for me and my brother,” the governor said. “It was a whole different environment.”

In the interview, Schwarzenegger said one of the first things he did after arriving in America was to buy health insurance. He did not want to “wait for a government program or anything like this. I went out in the gym and asked, ‘Who here can help me to get health insurance?’ And I remember it was $23 a month.”

During his early years in America, friends say, Schwarzenegger was a defiantly hard worker. He talks frequently about being a bricklayer in Santa Monica and working to repair fireplaces after the 1971 Sylmar quake rolled through the San Fernando Valley.

But he was hardly independent. As his bodybuilding career flourished, he received financial assistance not from the government but from Joe Weider, the bodybuilding promoter and pioneer, who provided him with an apartment, a car and a weekly salary.

Still, it is the sense of a man scrambling for success unaided that is at the heart of Schwarzenegger’s political argument. At a campaign event in Sacramento this year, a student asked Schwarzenegger how to manage working full time and juggling college studies. She found it impossible. The governor told her to simply work harder.

“Too many kids today are thinking about what can I get out of this, how can I get the loan, and how can I get from my parents this, and how do I get this from the state,” Schwarzenegger told the student. “It’s the wrong way to look.”

Over the last three years as governor, Schwarzenegger said his views have moderated. Time after time, Schwarzenegger has scaled back cuts in social programs after protests by advocates for the poor or disabled. During his tenure, state spending has grown more than 26%.

“When I came over here, I was much more kind of like -- it is all up to the individual and that is the end of that.” Now, he said, he realizes “some people don’t have bootstraps.”

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Like Schwarzenegger, state Treasurer Angelides talks about the promise of America -- but his version is etched more soberly. He repeatedly tells crowds that dreams and gumption aren’t enough to make it, and invokes the struggles of his Greek immigrant grandparents.

Angelides remembers a grandmother who “literally worked herself to death” doing piecework as a seamstress. His grandparents, he said, never learned English.

“By all accounts my grandmother worked 15 hours a day and her dream was that my dad would go to college,” Angelides said.

At one point during the Depression, official charity made all the difference.

“My dad said he came from a very prideful family,” Angelides said, “but at the time when things were the worst -- when my grandfather didn’t have a job and my grandmother made whatever she could from sewing -- they made it because they got a box of food from the government.”

His father attended publicly funded UC Berkeley. The navigator of an Army Air Forces B-29 in the Pacific during World War II, he bought a house through the GI Bill.

In his family, Angelides said, “the ethic was one of the harder you worked, the more likely you are to succeed. But even with that, I was always reminded there are many people who do things I could never imagine.”

Thanks to the savings of his middle-class parents, Angelides had every educational advantage -- if barely. Angelides said his father researched “where the wealthiest families and the oldest-line families sent their kids” to high school. His parents, he said, scrupulously saved to afford his education at an exclusive prep school, the Thatcher School in Ojai. When his father was laid off from a state engineering job after cutbacks, they paid out of their savings.

“They didn’t go out to dinner at night. They didn’t go to movies. They didn’t buy fancy cars,” he said. “It was a very hard time in Sacramento. My parents ate up all their life savings, and when it was time for me to go to college, I only was able to get through because Harvard gave me ample financial aid.”

His family experience is replayed in the campaign when Angelides cites hotel or construction workers and wonders if “whether at the right points in their life they are going to be given a fair shake or a hand up.”

Like Schwarzenegger’s, Angelides’ view of the American dream is nuanced. He says he does not believe that government is the only hope, but that simple circumstance can change a life. When he applied to Harvard, the college ultimately accepted him. But it was only, Angelides said, because “the guy who interviewed me took a liking to me. I wasn’t the No. 1 guy in the class. He just believed I had the right stuff.”

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robert.salladay@latimes.com