The West Virginia Hotel Workers Who Ironed the Sheets of Their Enemies
After World War II Broke Out, Hundreds of Axis Diplomats Were Detained in America’s Rural Luxury Resorts
In the 1930s, as the drumbeats of war in Europe and the Far East grew louder, Americans maintained their workaday lives and strived for business as usual—as did their employers. “At a traditionally famous hotel, the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia,” read one ad in the April 1938 issue of Nation’s Business, “Mr. Loren Johnston, General Manager, wanted a letterhead as fine as the classic columns of his portico, as fresh and crisp as his table linens, as pleasing as the rhythm of his dinner hour orchestra. The …
