Exemplary Consumer-Citizens and Protective State Stewards: How Reformers Shaped Censorship Outcomes Regarding The Untouchables

Eliot Ness questioned Joe Bucco, but it was no use—Bucco would never reveal what he knew about Vittorini's brutal death or any other detail that would betray his loyalty to the Mafia. "The Noise of Death" episode of The Untouchables (1959–64) built upon Ness's reputation as Al Capone's nemesis but fictionalized the crime fighter by scripting him into crusades against other organized criminals. As in "The Noise of Death," many of the series' imaginary criminals were given names like "Bucco" and "Vittorini." In response, boycott instructions and blustery rhetoric covered the pages of Italian American newspapers across the country. Every effort must be made, they declared, to stop the slur of the Mafia from adhering so persistently and perniciously to their ethnic identity. If other Americans viewed images of organized criminals with Italian last names and Italian immigrant accents, they reasoned, Italian Americans' cultural and even political status would be jeopardized. Meanwhile, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons filed a complaint with the FCC charging that the series' fictionalizations were unfair to lawmen and that images from The Untouchables would cause viewers to doubt the competence and honesty of their police forces and promote criminal behavior.

Each group's efforts to censor The Untouchables were shaped by their respective understandings of television as a powerful medium. For both sets of objectors, viewers' sympathy with characters on the screen was believed to affect viewers' attitudes or actions in everyday life. To the extent that the would-be censors' views of television differed, so did their preferred means of censorship. How the TV was constructed—particularly the imagined power dynamic between the viewer and the medium—shaped the adopted tactics and the ultimate outcomes of protests against The Untouchables. Government hearings vetted concerns about violence, representations of police, and the possibility of the state taking a greater hand in regulating television. Despite their high profile, the hearings neither resulted in government censorship nor inspired industry-initiated efforts to appease the government's concerns. On the other hand, the boycotts and letter campaigns of Italian American antidefamation activists led to public disclaimers and apologies and even changed scripts.

In what follows I consider how competing constructions of television's power—circulating through a variety of sources, including popular press, academic research, and congressional hearings—shaped protestors' reactions to television content as well as the tactics and results of their censorship campaigns rather than focus on the specific representations that incited these controversies. The understanding of television as a powerful medium that was nevertheless bound to consumer preferences reinforced the position of the Italian American antidefamation movement and contributed to their winning fairly radical concessions from The Untouchables' production company, Desilu. These Italian American groups, however, rarely invoked recent scholarly studies or the shared concerns of would-be government regulators, which imagined viewers as relatively less able to resist the influence of the TV medium without increased regulation by the state. Likewise, congressional hearings that subpoenaed network representatives regarding the content of The Untouchables and other action-adventure programming included psychiatrists, communications professors, and concerned government officials but did not acknowledge the grievances, let alone the recent victories, of the ethnic protestors who had addressed television viewers as impressionable but ultimately discerning consumer activists. However separately statist and Italian American spokespersons presented their cases, each relied upon and, in part, constructed a particular understanding of television's power vis-à-vis its viewers, an understanding that became a structuring factor in articulating and negotiating their complaints against the series. In the end, Italian American activists provided a means and model for public-responsive censorship that still did not invite government participation, a tactic that allowed content restrictions to appear as democratic and market-driven rather than as a special interest or state-driven encroachment on American freedoms.

The lively, early-1960s debates over The Untouchables series have drawn previous scholarly attention from those interested in violence or ethnicity in the context of mid-century television. William Boddy has argued that the controversy over the series' notoriously violent...