After refusing to eat for 15 days, with the exception of some french fries consumed under protest on Valentine’s Day, Mel Reynolds has yet to win any concessions or even much public sympathy for his cause.
But the hunger strike the former congressman undertook to object to restrictive conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he is awaiting federal trial on fraud charges, attempts to draw on one of the most powerful and time-honored forms of political dissent.
With its latent associations to religious fasting, the hunger strike retains a strong symbolic element that other types of activism, like picketing or leafletting, sometimes lack.
Its use as social protest dates at least to medieval Ireland, where it was part of the legal code. And, traditionally, it has been the last resort of those so disenfranchised they see their only weapon as the destruction of their own bodies.
Mahatma Gandhi went on repeated fasts during India’s struggle for independence. In 1981, when Bobby Sands and nine other Irish nationalist prisoners in Northern Ireland starved themselves to death to protest their treatment, they drew worldwide attention and reignited the Irish Republican Army’s fight against British rule there.
Recently, though, the hunger strike has become an increasingly popular, and some critics argue, more trivial political pursuit.
Earlier this month, two Bolingbrook teenagers went on a one-day hunger strike to demand that their father drop a bitter custody battle.
Last year, Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes fasted for four days because a South Carolina business group didn’t allow him to participate in a debate.
At college campuses across the country, students have gone on hunger strikes–some of which work as relays that leave no one without food for more than a day–to protest everything from federal budget cuts in education to, at Northwestern University, the lack of an Asian-American studies program.
“Suddenly, in the last year or so, the hunger strike has become a casual fad for a variety of issues that can and should be resolved through the system,” said Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“When hunger strikes are done for issues that are not intractable, by people who otherwise are well-fed, you have to question their sincerity. This is the most serious level of civil protest. This is saying `I would die for this.’ “
The roots of hunger strikes likely lie in religious fasting, which many of the world’s faiths incorporate as a means of penitence or spiritual growth. Among the most notable examples is the Fasting Nun of Liecester, who, according to legend, let nothing but communion pass her lips for seven years. She died in 1275.
Most Christians are currently observing Lent, which includes fasting, and Jews fast on Yom Kippur and several other holidays.
Fasting for secular purposes became fairly common in Ireland during the Middle Ages, when the law allowed someone to force another to comply with a legal claim by fasting on his doorstep.
The idea was that the defendant would be publicly shamed into paying up. A similar concept operated in India, where peasants who owed money could fast to buy extra repayment time.
In modern times, hunger strikes have carried particularly deep political resonance in India and Ireland, two countries that have experienced devastating famines.
“Rather than being refused the opportunity to eat, the victim refuses it,” wrote Seamus Deane, the Keough professor of Irish studies at Notre Dame, in a recent paper on the topic. “It claims, thereby, the existence of an internal realm–that of the body–that the State cannot control; it robs the State of its claimed monopoly over life and death. It is suicide, of course; but a public, not a private act.”
What the act–or threat–of suicide by starvation accomplishes remains questionable.
The 10 Irish nationalist hunger-strikers who died in 1981 did not win their five demands for special status as prisoners. But some historians argue the extraordinary public drama of their drawn-out deaths renewed public support for the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, throughout the 1980s.
Hunger strikes that fail to achieve their stated aims still invariably attract public attention. Because of that, some say, they can influence public opinion, even if on a small scale.
In 1982, Nancy Bothne worked as a lobbyist in Springfield for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Every day that summer, she encountered a group of seven women who were fasting outside the Capitol building to help bring about ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The women ended their fast after 37 days, following the amendment’s defeat in the Illinois House.
“(The hunger strike) was not effective in moving votes or anything like that,” said Bothne, who is now Midwest regional director of Amnesty International. “But it was effective in reaching some hearts. It reached my heart.”
For Kathy Kelly, who has devoted much of her time over the past two decades to working as a peace activist, the reasons for fasting are personal as well as political.
Kelly, who is 45, has fasted in Haiti, Jordan, Nicaragua, Ft. Benning, Ga., and the Chicago Loop, among other sites.
“Even if you don’t achieve a political impact, it’s worth it for the self-understanding,” she said.
The longest Kelly has gone without food is 28 days. After three or four days, she said, she no longer feels hungry or thinks about food.
That’s fairly common, medical experts say. What happens when people begin fasting is that the body essentially slows down.
The heart and breathing rates drop and the body begins conserving its energy, said Dr. Sohrab Mobarahan, director of the clinical nutrition unit at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
To feed itself, the body starts consuming its stores of fat and protein. The muscles waste away. By the second or third week, Mobaharan said, weight loss can be significant and dangerous.
But the physical impact varies widely, depending upon the person’s health. Without water, people usually die within two weeks. But they can survive much longer without food. The longest any of the 10 Irish nationalist hunger-strikers survived was 73 days. One died after 45 days.
In Reynolds’ case, officials at the jail won permission last week from a judge to force-feed him if and when that becomes necessary.
As of Monday afternoon, Reynolds was still refusing to eat but officials had made no attempt to intervene medically, according to his attorney.
Reynolds was moved to the federal jail earlier this month from a state prison in East Moline, where he was serving a 5-year sentence for charges that included having sex with an underage campaign worker.
