Mathews, Robert Jay (1953–1984)

In 1984, Robert Jay Mathews was killed in a confrontation with federal agents on a remote island in Washington State's Puget Sound. Few outside the white supremacist and Christian Identity movements had heard of Mathews before his death; however, he was the founder of the Order, one of the most infamous white supremacist groups of the 1980s.

Mathews embraced the right-wing ideologies early; at age 11, he joined the local John Birch Society in Phoenix, Arizona. By high school, he was attending tax resistance seminars held by Arizona Patriot Marvin Cooley, who occasionally appointed Mathews sergeant-at-arms for meetings. At 19, Mathews formed the Sons of Liberty, a paramilitary group composed mostly of Mormons and survivalists who trained in the nearby desert. By 1973, however, the Sons of Liberty was foundering. Mathews left Arizona and the tax rebellion movement and moved to the rural community of Metaline Falls, Washington.

In Metaline Falls, Mathews joined the neo-Nazi National Alliance and began a reading program in “racial progress” that included Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and William Simpson's Which Way Western Man? His education later included The Road Back, a terrorist instruction manual, Essays of a Klansman, by Louis Beam, and William Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries, which portrays the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and a race war that establishes an “Aryan” world.

By the early 1980s, Mathews had also connected with the nearby Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. Mathews shared with the Aryan Nations the goal of establishing a separate white nation in [Page 223]the Pacific Northwest. (Richard Girnt Butler, head of Aryan Nations, said Mathews was “of the highest idealism and moral character.”) At the Aryan Nations compound, Mathews began to form the inner circle of what would become known, variously, as Bruder Schweigen, the Silent Brotherhood, or the Order.

Mathews's vision of the Order was inspired, in part, by the violent crimes of the far left, such as the 1981 failed Brinks armored truck robbery in New York, attempted by members of the Black Liberation Army and May 19 Communist Organization. The Order was also modeled closely on the fictional organization in The Turner Diaries.

From 1983 to 1984, the Order counterfeited money and stole nearly $4 million to fund the coming race war. Members of the group bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, and a pornography shop in Spokane, Washington. In June 1984, the Order murdered Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host in Denver, Colorado.

By November 1984, authorities had caught up with Mathews in Portland, Oregon, with the help of FBI informant Thomas Allen Martinez. Mathews was wounded in a gunfight before escaping. In early December, police located Mathews on Whidbey Island, in Puget Sound. Two hundred officers surrounded the house where Mathews held them at bay for 36 hours with a machine gun. On December 7, 1984, Mathews died in a blaze set by a flare dropped from a helicopter by the FBI. For many on the racist right, he died a martyr.