The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI, also MPA) was an American organization of high-profile, politically conservative members of the Hollywood film industry. It was formed in 1944 for the stated purpose of defending the film industry, and the country as a whole, against what its founders claimed was communist and fascist infiltration.
The initial, immediate purpose in forming the organization was to assemble a group of well-known show business figures willing to attest, under oath, before Congress to the supposed presence of Communists in their industry. And indeed, when the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated the motion picture industry, the vast majority of "friendly witnesses" were supplied by the Alliance.
Prominent members of the Alliance included Robert Arthur, Martin Berkeley, Ward Bond, Clarence Brown, Charles Coburn, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Irene Dunne, Victor Fleming, Clark Gable, Cedric Gibbons, Hedda Hopper, Leo McCarey, James Kevin McGuinness, Adolphe Menjou, George Murphy, Fred Niblo, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Morrie Ryskind, Norman Taurog, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, King Vidor, John Wayne, Frank Wead and Sam Wood.
The Alliance officially disbanded in 1975.
Read more about Motion Picture Alliance For The Preservation Of American Ideals: Statement of Principles, Ayn Rand Pamphlet
Famous quotes containing the words motion picture, motion, picture, alliance, preservation, american and/or ideals:
“Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“till disproportion’d sin
Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“The measure discriminates definitely against products which make up what has been universally considered a program of safe farming. The bill upholds as ideals of American farming the men who grow cotton, corn, rice, swine, tobacco, or wheat and nothing else. These are to be given special favors at the expense of the farmer who has toiled for years to build up a constructive farming enterprise to include a variety of crops and livestock.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)