Wood became a committed and ardent Anti-Communist in the years that saw the rise of McCarthyism in the late 1940s. Wood first exhibited this political perspective In 1943, when he reduced much of the anti-fascist content of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", saying "It would be the same love story if they were on the other side." In 1944, he founded and served as the first president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that was "dedicated to seeking out and expelling those people it considered traitorous to American interests."