After World War II, the Cold War began and anti-communism prevailed in the United States. Almost all Americans saw the Cold War as an ideological battle between “freedom” and “communism,” and they devoted themselves to praising “freedom” and the “American way of life” without much reflection. American conservative Christians were typical critics of communism.

Conservative Christians thought communism was not only God’s enemy but an American enemy. For example, fundamentalist Carl McIntire believed that the Cold War was “the battle between freedom and tyranny,” and so stressed “the business of Americans to lead the World into freedom.” But we should not think that all conservative Christians criticized communism in a similar way. In contrast to McIntire, evangelical Billy Graham saw a positive role for communism although he was considered a forceful anti-communist.

Graham was conscious of his calling as an evangelist. As an evangelist he preached the Gospel and challenged people to turn to Christ in repentance and faith through crusades, radio, TV and books. Some theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr regarded Graham’s messages as problematic because he optimistically believed that conversion was the sole remedy to all the problems in the world.

However Graham was no optimist for he emphasrzed,the doctrine of original sin. In Peace with God (1953), Graham refers to Genesis and indicates how Adam committed the sin of trying to become king instead of obeying God’s law. And so Americans, who are offspring of Adam, also have sin and their “freedom” is not perfect. Compared to a nationalistic Christian like McIntire, Graham realized that American freedom was imperfect as was communism. In World Aflame (1965), moreover, Graham developed his analysis of sin and described the paradox of man: coexistence of goodness and sin.

In addition to developing his theology, in World Aflame, Graham emphasized that the Last Judgement will be carried out soon. As an evangelist, Graham hoped that Americans would accept the Gospel message, repent and lead a Christian life, while at the same time he realized,that humans were too weak to give themselves up to God. Finally Graham made a decision to use the controversial word “Communism.” He referred to communism as a religion that asked the question “What is man?” Graham hoped that Americans would repent and come to faith while they contemplated this question posed at them. He recognized that communism was God’s instrument encouraging Americans to repent.

Reading Graham’s books carefully, we can see that he was not an all-out anti-communist like McIntire. Graham relativized, “freedom” from the perspective of the doctrine of original sin, and as an evangelist, understood communism as God’s instrument to persuade Americans to repent. But conservative Christians failed to understand Graham’s analysis of sin and evaluation of communism although they listened to Graham’s messages. Nationalistic Christians wanted Graham to be a leader of anti-communism. The image of Graham as an “anti-communist” was a result not onlv of his behavior but also mass nationalistic desire.

Although Bernard M. Baruch has been described in cold war studies as the United States representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, he was also regarded as an opinion-leader for hearing aid for World War II veterans. It is not only Baruch but Cybernetic groups and John Edgar Hoover, to name a few, who were greatly concerned with the recovery of wounded bodies. To understand why postwar cultures share a rhetoric of deafness and hearing aid, this paper explores magazine articles, advertisements, Hollywood films, and diplomatic discourses of the early cold war period. The various documents connect the notion of engineered, high-fidelity listening with the notion of masculine and freedom-loving nations that were beginning to confront the Soviet menace after the war.

Medical research soon after the World War II showed that there were more than seven million male veterans who were suffering from hearing disabilities as a consequence of military combat. To fight against the soviet regime, Cold Warriors such as Harry Truman, George Kennan and George Marshall argued that “deafness” was both the symptom of a lack of tough masculinity and the decline of free nations. They insisted that the United States should not “turn a deaf ear to” the appeal from the other nations (Truman Doctrine) and was destined to help the devastated world to “recover” with economic aid (Marshall Plan).

Civil defense against the Soviet’s missile in the 50’s also stimulated a cultural and sociological reception of hearing aid. Soon after the development of the hydrogen bomb in the Soviet Union, the film version of The War of the Worlds (1953) depicted a male character who complained that “something [was] wrong with [his] hearing aid”. Warning sirens spreading around the nation, also featured in the film, transformed the notion of human ear into a machine, which could distinguish information from noise.

Deafness was also a politically contested disease among males in the McCarthy hearings. When John Howard Lawson of the Hollywood ten was asked whether he had been a member of the Communist Party, he acted as if he were deaf and avoided naming names. Many blacklistees repeated Lawson’s hard of hearing performance while citing the First Amendment. This logic was also featured in Joseph H. Lewis’s noir film The Big Combo (1955). The film treats hearing aid as a dangerous technology as the protagonist, an American policeman, breaks his ear organ.

Historically considered, deafness in the postwar society was first interpreted as weak national stance against Communism. Along with cultural infiltration of hearing aid technology, human ears with prosthetic were gradually narrated and recognized as an information machine. In this regard,Cyberneticians, audiologists, cold warriors, and citizens in the 50’s started, all at the same time, to share an unconsciously political view of the body. With cultural constructions of prosthetic-appended ears, the wounded spaces of the post-war world were at last transformed into, and perceived as, the cold war information space.