Manufacturing fear

From The Fearmakers (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1958). Alan Eaton (Dana Andrews), POW and victim of brainwashing, returns from Korea to Washington, D.C., only to find that his partner in a two-man public-relations and polling firm is dead and that the business has been taken over by one Jim McGinnis (Dick Foran). The new company is in the business not of measuring public opinion but of manufacturing it, with faux-roots organizations and mass-produced letters to politicians promoting Soviet-approved positions. “We turn the screws on the United States Congress,” McGinnis brags. “And from there it’s just a step to the White House.”

Eaton says that McGinnis is just manufacturing fear:

“Millions of people being lied to, taken for suckers. You know, it's a funny thing: they have pure food and drug laws to keep people from buying poison to put in their stomachs. And you're peddling poison to put in their minds.”

And Eaton to the company secretary, Lorraine Dennis (Matilee Earle), as the two stand before the Lincoln Memorial:

“You know, he was right. You can't fool all the people all the time. But nowadays you don't have to fool all the people — just enough to swing it for the Fletchers and the Jessups.”

It’s a prescient movie, streaming at TCM through July 31.

[“The Fletchers and the Jessups”: referencing other characters, lobbyists and Communist sympathizers.]