Politics & Power Quote by Woodrow Wilson

Wilson is doing something slyly pragmatic here: laundering an argument for material security through the moral authority of Christianity. By invoking the Lord's Prayer, he folds economics into the nation’s spiritual self-image, insisting that “business” isn’t a grubby sidebar to American life but its enabling infrastructure. The line works because it reverses a familiar piety. Instead of treating commerce as a distraction from virtue, Wilson treats hunger as the real threat to virtue. Faith, neighborliness, civic responsibility - all of it becomes contingent on bread.

The subtext is political triage. A politician who wants latitude to regulate markets, stabilize wages, or defend labor can’t sound like he’s attacking prosperity; he has to sound like he’s protecting the conditions under which morality is even possible. “Business underlies everything” is both a concession to the era’s worship of industry and a warning: if the economic base collapses, the nation’s ethical superstructure collapses with it. It’s a sanitized version of a more radical idea - that material conditions shape consciousness - translated into Sunday-school language.

Context matters. Wilson’s public life spans the Progressive Era and World War I, when industrial capitalism was producing unprecedented wealth and equally visible deprivation, labor conflict, and migration to cities. In that climate, “empty stomach” isn’t metaphor. It’s social volatility. The rhetorical move is to make feeding people not charity but governance, and to make economic policy a prerequisite for spiritual health rather than a competing priority.