A slick salesman approaches the men, offering them a solution to all their problems in the form of a magic tonic known as ISM, which he claims will "cure any ailment of the body politic."

Public then regales the men with a tale of Joe Doakes (another generic American name), a lowly inventor in the 1890s, who became wealthy thanks to his inventions for the automotive industry.

The film found widespread adoration in Cold War America, but recent historians have criticized its propagandist nature and its subtle suggestion that communists should face mob violence.

[5] Sokolsky said that the film “explains why the United States is an excellent place in which to live—in fact a better place than those proletarian heavens that are so widely advertised by the speakers of utopias.”[6] Sokolsky believed that the film needed to be shown in every American theatre and declared that the film “is propaganda that parents should take their children to see, because our children need to know beyond doubt [sic] that just being an American is a blessing.”[6] Historian Chase Winstead wrote in Invasion USA: Essays on Anti-Communist Movies of the 1950s and 1960s that "Make Mine Freedom has a serious point of view, and worse still, it's determined to make that point of view our point of view.

Nicely animated (though not as fully as the MGM unit's other theatrical cartoons), it skates by on craft, while assuming that American audiences are a bunch of dummies to be gulled with visual and textual cliches that pass as wit.

"[1] In his book Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex, Tony Perucci notes that in Make Mine Freedom, "mob violence against Communist instigators is celebrated as patriotic.

[w]ith Looney Tunes-style music, the raging mob attacks the Communist, running him out of town, as his screams fade into a patriotic fife and drum.