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.