John B. Trevor, Sr.

Who was John B. Trevor, Sr.?

John Bond Trevor Sr. was an American lawyer and "one of the most influential unelected officials affiliated with the U.S. Congress." He was very active in the immigration debate, once described as "the most influential lobbyist for restriction." Along with Pennsylvania senator David A. Reed, and with strong support from the AF of L labor leader Samuel Gompers, he was influential in shaping the Immigration Act of 1924, which put in place restrictive immigration quotas and stood until 1964. Immigration advocate Louis Adamic wrote of Trevor that "if a man's love for his country is measurable by his detestation of all who had the bad taste to be born elsewhere, there probably is no greater patriot in America to-day."

Trevor received his law degree from Harvard and was a prominent New York socialite. Trevor belonged to the circle of Madison Grant. According to the New York Times, Trevor was a founder of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and the 1951 recipient of the Sons of the American Revolution's gold medal for Americanism.

Following World War I, Trevor worked in military intelligence as a Captain in the US Army and was decorated as Chevalier in the French Légion d’Honneur for his assistance to the French Army in a matter of national importance. He was Deputy Attorney General of the State of New York in 1919, served as associate counsel for the Sub-Committee of the U.S. Senate on Foreign Relations in 1920, and as Counsel of the New York State Legislative Committee Investigating Subversive Activities in 1920. Because of his work in uncovering Bolshevist terrorists in New York, many of whom happened to be Jewish, Trevor was accused of being anti-Semitic and was the object of numerous attacks on his character. For example, historian William H. Tucker makes this unfounded accusation: "Trevor developed a plan to suppress a mass uprising of Jewish subversives in New York City, going so far as to order 6,000 rifles and a machine gun battalion for deployment in Jewish neighborhoods in anticipation of a disturbance that never took place." In 1954 the Atlanta Constitution published an article falsely associating Trevor with an organization called the Coalition of Patriotic Societies that supposedly was pro-Nazi. Though retracted on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution on January 23, 1957, the original false story continued to be picked up by publications such as Rolling Stone, authors Adam Miller and J.W. Bendersky, as well as many others. These false accusations persist today, and have tarnished Trevor’s reputation and that of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.