Character Analysis
Wyndam-Matson is such a powerful person that his first name is "Mr." When Frank Frink thinks about W-M, he thinks not just about W-M's face, but about his expensive jewelry, identifying W-M as a "power" (1.42).
W-M runs the W-M Corporation, which makes most of its profits from making fake antiques (4.31). That ties him into the arts and crafts plot: Frank Frink makes the fakes, W-M sells them to Ray Calvin (see "Wyndham-Matson's People"), Ray Calvin sells them to Robert Childan, and Childan sells them to Tagomi and other Japanese officials.
W-M also plays an important role in Frink's story because (a) W-M pays the blackmail that lets Edfrank Jewelry start up, and (b) W-M asks the cops to look into Frink and McCarthy, which results in Frank Frink getting arrested (and almost sent to German territory to be killed because he's Jewish).
So that's all important plot issues. The real reason we're interested in W-M, though, (rather than just filing him away in Minor Characters) is that he gets one POV section where he lays out the theme of history and authenticity. Chapter Five starts with a long section where he argues that you can't really tell real antiques from fakes because the sense of history is all in the mind. It's great for us if we're writing a paper on the theme of history in Man in the High Castle. When he shows two lighters to his girlfriend-date "Rita," he points out that they look the same, so there's no way to know that one of them is an important antique:
"And I know which it is. You see my point. It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here." He tapped his head. "In the mind, not the gun." (5.26)
There's a lot to unpack there, including the way W-M avoids any guilt. He's running a scam, making fake antiques, but it's really all the customers' faults: "they're playing it on themselves." But then his argument keeps bringing up the idea of knowing. He knows which lighter is authentic, two guns look the same "unless you know" what to look for. So he's trying to argue that fakes are just as good as real antiques—but is he really making an argument the knowledge is what separates out the authentic stuff from the fake stuff? After all, he can tell which lighter is real because he knows what to look for—"the long scratch across its side" (5.36). So, they're not entirely identical after all.
Unfortunately for W-M, he's trying to get a woman in bed and all his talk about assassinating presidents is not helping him. Well, we never liked him that much anyway.