Blood and Politics (20 page)

A second mistake proved even more fatal. Mathews had recruited a former National Alliance comrade in Philadelphia, Tom Martinez, to help pass counterfeit money. Martinez used the phony bills near his home, was quickly arrested, and just as quickly turned informant. He then led the FBI to Portland, Oregon, where they picked up Mathews’s trail. After a brief firefight that left him wounded, Mathews escaped to Whidbey Island in Washington State. There he hid with several others until their safe house was surrounded. Everyone but Mathews surrendered. He preferred to shoot it out. On December 8, 1984, after a forty-hour gun battle with a helicopter and FBI ground troops, Robert Mathews died as the house burned to the ground around him.
⁹
Like Gordon Kahl, he was incinerated.
¹⁰

Over the next five months, most of the rest of The Order were captured in groups of twos and threes in a massive roundup from Georgia and North Carolina through Missouri to Montana. With each new arrest, the FBI turned Aryan warriors into abject informants. The underground apparatus unraveled as half the soldiers squealed on the other half.

Unusual in this instance was nineteen-year-old Order soldier David Tate. His father had been Butler’s number two man at the Idaho camp, and his mother acted as church secretary to the group. His two sisters subsequently married noteworthy movement personages. Tate hoped to escape down the back roads of Missouri and hide at the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord camp. On April 15, 1985, during a traffic stop, Tate rolled out of his van—much as Richard Snell had the year before—and killed a Missouri highway patrolman, Jimmie Linegar. Authorities arrested a tired and hungry Tate several days later without further bloodshed.

The incident highlighted the connection between the Aryan bandits and the CSA compound in the Ozarks. On the fateful day of April 19, more than four hundred law enforcement officials surrounded the remote camp. They knew its inhabitants were heavily armed, and they sought help negotiating the CSA’s surrender. The FBI called upon
Robert Millar from Elohim City in Oklahoma, and he talked his old friend James Ellison into vacating the encampment without a firefight. Ellison, his lieutenants, and several Order members were quietly arrested on weapons and conspiracy charges. The last days of Mathews’s Order also effectively became the last days of Ellison’s paramilitary CSA.

April 1985 also marked the eighth and last issue of the
Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert
. This edition was markedly different from the previous seven. The names of Louis Beam and Robert Miles, which had graced the masthead of all previous issues, were gone. Instead of a return address and mailing permit from Idaho, this issue was posted from Camden, Arkansas. Rather than neatly typed essay-style articles discussing strategy and organization, a few newspaper reprints detailed Robert Mathews’s fiery death. It was unknown who published this last newsletter, but it gave pointed instructions: “The Second American Revolution will be a revolution of individuals, a revolution without exact precedent in recorded history. Because individuals can accomplish complex acts of resistance without peril of betrayal or even detection by the most advanced snooping devices, missions FORMERLY ASSIGNED TO GROUPS MAY BE UNDERTAKEN BY INDIVIDUALS EQUIPPED TO FIGHT ALONE [emphasis in original].”

James Ellison and a few others at the top of the Covenant ammo dump quickly pleaded guilty to weapons charges and were convicted of racketeering in a federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas. With Ellison in jail, the remaining campers returned to their cabins. But the entire 224-acre Ozark business went bankrupt, and the action shifted to Seattle.

The U.S. attorney for western Washington needed six assistant attorneys to bring a ninety-three-page indictment against twenty-three of the approximately four dozen people involved in The Order.
¹¹
The martyred Robert Mathews, of course, was not indicted. Individuals who had simply aided or abetted the bandits while they hid from the law were left off the Seattle list and tried elsewhere. A couple of unknown Canadians rumored to have been members escaped into the ether. Robert Miles, Louis Beam, and William Pierce—the three men who had most motivated Robert Mathews—were not indicted.

In federal court, the case turned on charges of conspiracy and racketeering. Originally designed as an anti-Mafia statute, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act prohibited running a criminal enterprise, such as a prostitution ring or drug dealership. Bank
robbery, for example, is not simply grand larceny under RICO if, and only if, it is an element of a larger business operation. Evidence that the indicted had paid themselves salaries and bought properties became more legally salient than their “Declaration of War.” No state murder charges were ever filed for the deaths of Alan Berg and Walter West, but those murders were among the overt acts listed in Seattle as furthering the racketeering and conspiracy. Another twenty charges were based on specific federal violations, such as disrupting interstate commerce.

Of those indicted, only ten went to trial in September 1985. At that time Order member Richard Scutari had not yet been captured. Young David Tate remained in the custody of the state of Missouri, awaiting trial for the murder of Patrolman Linegar. Eleven others pleaded guilty prior to trial. Several testified against their (former) comrades. Those numbers meant that 50 percent of these indicted revolutionaries “turned over” for the prosecution, an unusually high rate for people supposedly motivated by ideology rather than greed.

Prosecutors were careful not to let First Amendment concerns become a factor. The defendants’ ideas, a special assistant U.S. attorney argued, were “significant only because those feelings, those hatreds, those animosities are what motivated them to commit the crimes.” And there were dozens of crimes for him to present as evidence. The prosecutor also argued that “there will be evidence, not completely, but there will be evidence that to a certain extent Bob Mathews and this group followed the principles, if you will, of the
Turner Diaries
.” Referring to the novel apparently riled the defendants, who objected. The judge overruled their objection, however, a sign that the defendants’ politics would, in fact, be germane to the proceedings.

One particular moment vibrated with the rhythms of battles to come. In an opening statement, a defense attorney acknowledged that his client was a Klan member and an avowed white separatist. “Now I say white separatist,” he continued, “because there is a significant difference in an individual who professes to be a white supremacist as opposed to a white separatist.” What was that difference? “The white separatist is nothing different than a black nationalist who advocates a separation of races, wants to live only with those members of his race. He advocates the fact that races when mixed together cannot survive because of their division in their cultural backgrounds, their upbringing and their history.”
¹²

The Seattle jury did not buy this spurious distinction between white supremacy and “white separatism” in 1985, any more than the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to endorse the “separate but equal” doctrine
in 1954. Neither did the jury believe defense efforts to impugn the credibility of Aryans who became prosecution witnesses. Nor did jurors accept contentions that the defendants’ beliefs were unrelated to the enumerated crimes. After four months at trial, all were found guilty.

Judges and juries, however, can change with the tides of public opinion. And the Seattle racketeering trial was not the last of its kind.

The Order changed everything. Years after its last soldier was sent to jail, it remained a nodal point in the development of the movement. In the aftermath of the police crackdown, a debate pitted the violence-prone wing of the movement against proponents of mainstream politicking. And the mainstreamers’ fortunes plumped up like the fat end of a toothpaste tube while the vanguardists’ enterprise was squeezed by the authorities. Long prison terms highlighted tactical differences between those who supported the “one army, one leader” thesis and Louis Beam’s leaderless resistance strategy. A more concentrated discussion began about carving a white nation-state out of the multiracial North American landmass. But first and foremost, Robert Mathews and his band of bandits inspired admiration.

In the Southeast, hundreds of camouflage-clad white supremacists marched in rank under Confederate battle flags in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina,
WE LOVE THE ORDER
on the banner at the front. In Idaho, a small group called Order II detonated a string of bombs in Coeur d’Alene. Among several West Coast groups, the day Robert Mathews died, December 8, became “Martyr’s Day.” Several memorial events included camping overnight on Whidbey Island, as close as possible to the shrine of death.

On multiple occasions, William Pierce embraced Mathews’s courage wholeheartedly, even while asserting a difference in tactics between The Order and the National Alliance. “He took up arms against the enemies of his race, knowing that he had virtually no chance of defeating them, or even of surviving more than a few skirmishes,” he wrote in 1985.
¹³

But their ultimate goals were the same. The Order, Pierce noted, “set its sights on a full-scale, armed revolution, ending with the purification of the U.S. population and the institution of a race-based authoritarian government.” It was aimed at the future.

Here it was again: no status quo ante, no black cities and white suburbs,
no genteel bourbon and branch water racism. That segregated past was part of the problem. The solution was an all-white nation.

“Men have died for the concept of nationalism. Men and women both. Both have died to be free of strangers. Robert Mathews died for that belief. Gordon Kahl died for that belief,” Bob Miles wrote shortly after Mathews’s death.

Even while the FBI was still rounding up the vestiges of The Order, Miles projected a new nation in the Northwest. He later fleshed out the idea of five states—Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington—seceding from the United States. He called it the “10 percent solution.” “The history books are full of people of all races and all nationalities, who died to be free. God willing we shall live to be free! Ourselves alone willing, we shall begin to form the new nation even while in the suffocating embrace of ZOG.”

Four months after the racketeering convictions in Seattle, in April 1986, Miles convened two hundred souls in a large shed he called the Hall of the Giants on his northern Michigan farmstead. They licked their wounds. Robert Mathews’s young widow, Debbie, stood to receive a round of applause. So did other wives and even parents of imprisoned Order soldiers. There was the usual round of speeches, but it was Miles’s proposal to create a white nation-state in the Northwest that dominated the conversation. Miles had an Ohio comrade explain again the benefits of moving to the Northwest, this time with statistics about population density and the number of nonwhites currently living in the territory. Miles made his case for the “10 percent solution.” It was still possible to wring victory from defeat, he argued. “Can we gain such a nation? Yes. [But] it will take time and patience.”

One by one he criticized the alternatives. Plans for a mid-America survival zone were “illusionary,” Miles argued in a direct hit on the idea once promoted by the Christian-Patriots Defense League. A survival zone was not a new nation created through population transfers or guerrilla warfare. Its racial character was the subtext, not the main theme, he explained.

The Northwest could be a refuge. “Consider,” he said, “it has all we want. Space that is not jammed already with hostiles, indifferents or aliens. It has a sea coast. It has mountains. It has water. It has land areas yet to be developed. It has a border which is definable. It has the warmth of the temperate zones but the cold which our Folk require in order to thrive.”
¹⁴

Miles’s lesson in geography had a larger point. He proposed an out-trek by white nationalists, from inside a multinational empire they once
controlled, but no longer did, to a territory where they could reinvent themselves. “We are not the majority in the USA,” he had written the year before. “We are a distinct minority. We are outsiders living in our own lands.”
¹⁵

This “minority” was not a historically constituted community with a distinct language on a specific territory. It had no internal market of goods and services it was trying to protect by establishing borders and tariffs. And it had no common religion; although many already believed the Christian Identity doctrine, some did not. Nor was Miles proposing a common theory of government; some believed in a strong authoritarian central state, but others were almost anarchists. Neither did they descend from a common ethnicity, as that term is conventionally understood. They were Scots-Irish from the Carolina piedmont, German and Scandinavian from the Midwest, and even of Italian and Slavic descent.

Political scientist Benedict Anderson refers to nations as “imagined communities.” As Miles conceived it, white nationalism was mostly a product of imagination.
¹⁶
“Let us be considered a Racial Nation of Aryans, living within the man-made boundaries of a political state,” he wrote in a declaration of independence. “Let us be recognized as a Folk who have different beliefs, values, and different life-styles than those which comprise your ‘loyal’ citizenry.”
¹⁷
His nation was founded on a mythical common culture and racial self-identity. It should be remembered, however, that nation-states had been created in the past out of little more.

Ultimately, the idea of creating an Aryan republic on a
piece
of North American territory served as a bridge between the white supremacist discourse of the past and the new white nationalism that would emerge after the end of the Cold War. But this particular proposal, in the mid-1980s, was due in large measure to the explosion of ideas following The Order, and its exponents had to take account of other ideas competing for adherents.