Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t the first person to
follow up a Hollywood career by being elected to serve as
California’s chief executive.
Former president Ronald Reagan followed the same path. He became
Cailfornia’s governor in 1967. Prior to being elected to that
post, he was an actor in the 1940s and 1950s, making over 50 films
in the span of his acting career.
In 1942, Reagan interrupted his acting career to serve in the
U.S. Army for three years. He was not able to engage in combat
because of his poor eyesight, but he made several training
films.
Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union
representing Hollywood personalities, in 1947.
He was reelected to serve five additional one-year terms as
president of the guild, during which he negotiated several union
contracts.
Reagan again put his acting career on hold in 1954 as he focused
on his political aspirations. In September of that year, he hosted
“General Electric Theater,” a weekly show in the
’50s that started Reagan’s political career.
Reagan’s 1964 speech delivered on the television program
on behalf of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign for
the United States presidency caught the attention of the Republican
party. In response to his speech, the GOP urged Reagan to run for
governor of California.
Reagan won the Republican nomination for governor in 1966 over
five other candidates and campaigned against then-California
governor Edmund G. Brown, a Democrat.
John Sandbrook, special assistant to the executive dean of the
College of Letters and Sciences, remembers Reagan’s campaign
theme.
“He campaigned on the theme of cleaning up the mess at
(University of California) Berkeley in reference to the Free Speech
Movement,” Sandbrook, who was a UCLA student at the time,
said. “The Free Speech Movement had caused concern among many
in the UC system.”
As a law-and-order candidate, Reagan won the governorship by
nearly one million votes, dealing Brown one of the most devastating
defeats in California political history.
Reagan’s victory over Brown caused some distress at UC
campuses and California State Universities. Students were worried
that Reagan would cut the university’s budget and make the
universities charge tuition in addition to their student fees.
Professor Emeritus David Saxon, who was dean of the physical
sciences department at the time, said the general reaction on the
UCLA campus to Reagan’s victory was surprise.
“Students didn’t see him as a qualified
candidate,” Saxon said. “I was very surprised and
didn’t expect an actor to become governor,” he
added.
While Reagan was governor he focused on taxes, government
spending, welfare reform and higher education.
In one of Reagan’s first acts as governor, he urged the UC
Board of Regents, the UC’s governing body, to fire then-UC
President Clark Kerr, who Reagan felt had been too lenient in
dealing with student demonstrations.
Under Reagan’s term, California also experienced a budget
crisis similar to the one today.
In his first two years as governor, Reagan reduced university
funding, which caused budget cuts to the UC and Cal State
systems.
Because of the budget cuts, the UCLA Academic Senate decided to
disestablish the journalism, speech and physical education
departments. Budget cuts also dissolved UCLA’s official
summer quarter and turned them into optional sessions.
In 1969, Reagan tried to implement a university tuition. The
university’s response to Reagan was to have a registration
fee instead of tuition.
Reagan approved the registration fee but also wanted the
proceeds to be used towards financial aid in order to help those
who could not pay the fee.
Reagan ran for California governor again in 1970 and won,
beating Democrat Jesse Unruh. In 1981 Reagan became the first
California governor to become president of the United States, after
he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter.
Despite their Hollywood backgrounds, there are many differences
between Reagan and Schwarzenegger. Reagan, for example, had some
political background prior to running for office and received the
official nomination of the Republican party, unlike
Schwarzenegger.
Sandbrook said Reagan and Schwarzenegger cannot be compared and
the coincidence that both are actors-turned-governors is merely
because of people’s fascination with Hollywood.
“Since both were known in Hollywood, it provided them with
the popularity, which increased their chances of getting
elected,” Sandbrook said.