The Deaf community today is split on the use of cochlear implants. Was there similar anger and argument during the spread of hearing aid use?

No - and the main reason is that the technology is vastly different and promises different results.

Attempts to aid hearing have been around since the 1600s, when the ear trumpet was developed.^1 There have been countless variations on the ear trumpet, and indeed they remain an effective mechanical way of amplifying sound. They were used until the development of electric hearing aids at the end of the 19th century.

Ear trumpets, though, have never been effective for severe to profound deafness; the amplification possible with such devices simply isn't that strong. People who used ear trumpets were typically late-deafened and already understood speech; they also were not fully deaf and more likely to associate only with hearing people.

Within the Deaf community in the 19th century, hearing aids were simply not in widespread use. Sign language was the main form of communication, and people didn't use hearing aids much - they didn't need them. In the late 1860s, though, the western hearing world began pushing for deaf people to learn to speak and listen, and not use sign language. This effort was spearheaded by Alexander Graham Bell in the United States, and took firm hold following the 1880 Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan, Italy. The congress resolved that speech was superior to sign language, and that all deaf children should be taught to listen and speak. This resolution changed deaf education permanently in the western world; indeed, it is this split between manualism and oralism that drives the cochlear implant debate today. (For more on this, see Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language by Douglas Baynton; see also the early 20th century films of sign language to encourage its preservation.)

Turning back to the development of hearing aids, the late 19th and early 20th century saw rapid advancements - the carbon microphone, the vacuum tube, miniaturization, electronics...for the late-deafened and hearing-socialized, these were very popular. For deaf kids in deaf schools, the result was images like this one from the Kentucky School for the Deaf. Every student has hearing aids attached to their desk to connect with the teacher, and their hands are folded on their desk so they don't sign.

For the most part, though, sign language continued to be used among children (outside the classroom) and adults. Unlike eyeglasses, which can give the user excellent eyesight, hearing aids don't restore perfect hearing, and sign language was still the chief form of communication. Even in the mid-20th century, though, no one would have thought hearing aids could erase Deaf culture, because they just weren't very good.

Even with the mid-century development of transistors allowing for even better and smaller hearing aids, the Deaf community was on the rise. With the first academic paper on American Sign Language being published in 1960,^2 and the return of sign language to the classroom in the form of Total Communication in the 1970s, nobody felt threatened by hearing aids - community cohesion could even be said to be at an all-time high with the Deaf President Now movement in 1988, which had a worldwide impact. Many students in this time wore hearing aids - but they were predominantly to assist with environmental sounds and some communication. They didn't replace natural hearing at all - as cochlear implants are said to do.

So hearing aid technology, by virtue of being nowhere near as good a "replacement" for natural hearing as cochlear implant technology, and by the parallel paths of the Deaf community and technological development, was never a threat to the Deaf community.

To divulge from the historical aspect a bit: cochlear implants would be far less controversial if they all came with sign language DVDs. The threat isn't the technology - it's the removal of sign language, the treatment of implanted kids as if they were hearing, etc. The Deaf community has a lot to offer the world (see Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity by Bauman and Murray) - the threat is only in its eradication, not by specific technological means.