Echoing McCarthyism, federal firings will inflict generations of trauma

Anyone who has been fired, or knows someone who has, must be shocked at the callousness of Elon Musk talking about taking a “chain saw” to agencies and Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, saying he wants government employees to be “traumatically affected” and “viewed as villains.” Making trauma for government employees a policy goal is horrific. I know, because I grew up in a home where that trauma hung in the air like smoke from the cigarettes chain-smoked by my mother — a civil servant fired without cause in the McCarthy era.

The ongoing mass firings of federal employees (over 100,000 at last count), arrests of activists and attacks on universities have rightly been compared to the Red Scare of the 1950s. Now, as then, people are being fired without a semblance of due process on baseless allegations of disloyalty or incompetence. Now, as then, the firings are inflicting trauma for those who are fired. Now, as then, the goal is to instill fear in those who remain. During the Red Scare, my mother was fired from a federal job on false charges of disloyalty. She never recovered.

Like many of today’s civil servants, my mother loved her job. She graduated from UC Berkeley at the end of World War II with a degree in international relations and a desire to help build the postwar order. She went to Washington, D.C., thrilled to work for an agency that valued her expertise in Soviet politics and facility with languages. A week before she was to depart for a two-year post in Berlin, her assignment was suddenly canceled. Someone accused her of being a communist because she had been seen with Russian emigres. She explained that her Russian acquaintances were anti-communists who had fled the country after the 1917 revolution, and she socialized with them to perfect colloquial Russian.

But in those days of hysteria, nobody would listen to reason. She was given no semblance of due process.

To understand how the experiences of today’s civil servants echo those of the Red Scare, I decided to open the dusty suitcase containing my mother’s letters and finally read them. At the time all this unfolded, she was writing every day to a close friend, who later became my father. I’ve had that suitcase of letters since she died 50 years ago but never could read through them because her pain was too raw.

Her letters from before her firing conveyed excitement about her work. And then there was one full of shock and disbelief. Maybe the decision would be reversed. Maybe it was a mistake. After a week, her tone turned to rage. She was a loyal American, a devoted public servant, a farm girl who had worked during college packing vegetables to support the war effort. Firing felt personal: The government rejected her and everything she had studied for and worked to achieve. She lost self-confidence. She succumbed to self-pity, and then quickly apologized for it. Her letters expressed anxiety, depression and fear about money.

Her letters describe the struggle to find another job that valued her skills. Some of her skills could not be used in the private sector. Even the transferable knowledge was useless in an era when most companies would hire women only as secretaries. Plus, as her letters prove, she was a mediocre typist. Her savings dwindled. She gave up her apartment and moved in with friends. Finally, she abandoned her career, accepted my father’s offer of marriage and became an unhappy housewife in a small Southern California college town.

Eventually she found a job teaching in a community college. But she never found another job that used her knowledge and training, and she never overcame the feelings of loss, grief and rejection. Her faith in her country had been shaken.

Today, as in the Red Scare, we should lament the damage that arbitrary firings do to scientific research, medical care, government services and academic freedom. The media have reported all this. But those who are fired are not faceless bureaucrats, as the government says. They are people who have devoted themselves to public service and have expertise that will be hard to use in the private sector. Many have families dependent on their income.

I teach and write on employment law, so I know that each case of a fired employee is a story of dashed hopes, anger and pain. When, as during the McCarthy era and now, government inflicts that pain on a mass scale, it magnifies the trauma to families and communities. Perhaps history will remember these mass firings as a tragic mistake the way so many of the Red Scare firings are now remembered. But the harms cannot be undone and will ripple through America for decades to come.

Catherine Fisk is a professor of law at UC Berkeley.