The Unwanted Boy who became Tennessee’s governor

If ever a child was born into circumstances that should have guaranteed failure, it was Bennie Wade.

He came into this world in 1870 — just five years after the end of the Civil War — in a small home on what is now Abbey Lane in Newport, Tennessee. His father was Dr. Lemuel Hooper, a young physician of some standing in the community. His mother was Sarah Wade, a servant. They were not married. In a town of 800 people where everyone knew everyone else’s business, that was not a small thing.

Not long after Bennie’s birth, his mother left Newport and placed her child in St. John’s Orphanage in Knoxville. Meanwhile his father married someone else. When Bennie was nine years old he was brought back to Newport to live with Dr. Hooper and his wife, whose only child had died. He was renamed Ben Walter Hooper. But a new name could not erase what the other children already knew — and they made sure he never forgot it.

He was taunted. He was shamed. He went to recess alone. He dreaded going downtown on Saturday afternoons because he could feel every eye burning into him, every whispered question hanging in the air: Who’s your daddy?

That question followed him everywhere.

The Moment That Changed Everything

When Ben was about twelve years old, a new preacher came to the Newport church. Ben had developed a habit of arriving late and slipping out early — anything to avoid the stares, the whispers, the weight of that unanswered question. But one Sunday the preacher said the benediction so quickly that Ben got caught in the crowd filing out.

Just as he reached the door, he felt a large hand on his shoulder. The new preacher looked down at him and asked the question Ben had dreaded his entire life: “Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?”

The whole room went quiet. Every eye turned.

But the preacher looked at that boy’s face — really looked at him — and a smile of recognition spread across his features.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I know who you are. I see the family resemblance. You are a son of God. Boy, you’ve got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.”

Ben Hooper would later say that was the single most important sentence ever spoken to him in his entire life.

He walked out of that church a changed person. And he never looked back.

From the Orphanage to the Governor’s Mansion

Ben Hooper went on to graduate from Carson Newman College in 1890. He read law under Newport attorney H.N. Cate and was admitted to the bar in 1894. He served in the Tennessee State Legislature, fought as a captain in the Spanish-American War, married the accomplished Anna Belle Jones, and raised six children.

In 1910 — this boy who had been placed in an orphanage, who ate his lunches alone on the playground, who flinched every time someone asked who his father was — was elected Governor of Tennessee. He was re-elected in 1912. He later served on the Railroad Labor Relations Board under President Harding, helped negotiate land purchases for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and resigned from that role when he concluded the property owners were not being treated fairly — because integrity mattered more to him than a title.

At past the age of 80, he served as vice-president of the Tennessee Constitutional Convention.

He wrote his autobiography before he died. The University of Tennessee Press published it posthumously in 1963. He titled it — with no bitterness, only honesty — The Unwanted Boy.

It remains one of the most remarkable stories in Tennessee history. And one of the most urgent for our time.

The Epidemic Nobody Wants to Talk About

I have told the story of Ben Hooper from this desk, in committee rooms at the Capitol, and on my WGNS radio program. And every single time, people stop and get quiet. Because somewhere in that story, they recognize something — a neighbor, a student, a grandchild, or maybe themselves.

What Ben Hooper survived was not just poverty or shame. He survived fatherlessness. And in 2026, fatherlessness is not a rare circumstance in America. It is an epidemic.

The numbers are staggering and they should break our hearts.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 18.4 million children in America are growing up without a father in the home. That is one in four American children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that children in father-absent homes are four times more likely to live in poverty. The statistics on what happens next are even more sobering.

Suicide. The CDC reports that children from fatherless homes are two to three times more likely to die by suicide. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people ages 10 to 34 in America. We are losing a generation and we are barely talking about it.