Early on the morning of June 12, our friend, and the friend of individual liberty and freedom, the first Libertarian Presidential candidate in 1972, passed quietly away in his sleep without pain and suffering, of natural causes.
John Hospers was born and raised in Pella, a town near the Iowa state capital, Des Moines, inhabited chiefly by descendants of émigrés from Holland in the early nineteenth century. John’s great-grandfather, also John Hospers, was one of the founders of Pella in l847 and l849, whose brother, Henry Hospers, became part of the “second emigration” from Holland a few years later and settled in Sioux County in northwest Iowa, founding Orange City, where some of the Hospers clan still live. The greeting “Oranje boven” (long live the House of Orange) is still familiar there, through the Dutch language, which was current in both Pella and Orange City in the early years, and was still the language of daily conversation there when John Jr. was growing up speaking Dutch in the 1920s. His ‘first language’ has become almost unknown to the generation that is now in its 30s.
