File talk:Coat of arms of the United States of America.svg

Official coat of arms

Before I revert again :-) I guess I should defend this a bit more. The obverse of the Great Seal is, and has always been, the official coat of arms of the United States. The notion that "the United States has no official coat of arms" appears to be an Internet meme with no basis in fact. Several points:

• One page which goes over this is here; they cite several things which show otherwise.
• The instructions of the three original Great Seal committees explicitly referred to the obverse side as the "coat of arms", and indeed the official law eventually enacted describes it as an "Armorial Achievement" (a fancy name for a coat of arms), and the design was separated into three sections, "Arms", "Crest", and "Reverse", and again referred to "arms" in the explanation. So, it was there, officially, from 1782 on.
• When the Congress authorized the Indian Peace Medals in 1786 (see here), they specified the design include the "Arms of the United States" without any other explanation. That was an official act of Congress, so obviously the arms officially existed.
• Not an act of Congress, but when a couple of diplomatic medals were awarded (see here), the instructions for their creation from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson included "On one side must be the Arms of the United States, of which I send you a written description and several impressions in wax to render that more intelligible."
• The very first item of business done by the Supreme Court, in 1790, was to define its seal, and they ordered that “the seal of the Court shall be the Arms of the United States” (which is still the case).
• The book Eagle and the Shield, published in 1978 by Richard Patterson and Richardson Dougall, pages 535-7, goes into the territory a little bit -- not really on its existence, as I guess that meme didn't exist at the time, but to answer the question "What is the difference between the Great Seal and the United States Coat of Arms?". As part of that, it plainly states, "The coat of arms of the United States is the design or device of the obverse of the Great Seal. It was always intended that this should be so." It goes on to mention the report of the first committee ("The great Seal should on one side have the Arms of the United States of America") and the original law I mentioned above. It also notes "the coat of arms, as now used, usually includes the entire obverse design of the Great Seal, although a literal reading of the 1782 action would support the omission of the crest. At times, just the shield or escutcheon, with its blue chief and white and red pales, is referred to as the coat of arms [...] but in current official practice the 'coat of arms of the United States' includes shield, eagle, olive branch, arrows, motto, and crest."
• The State Department pamphlet on the Great Seal plainly states "The design of the obverse of the Great Seal, which is the coat of arms of the United States, is used by the government in many ways." Not much ambiguity there either.

Really, it would seem any notion that the arms have never been official seems to be utterly false, without much basis. I'd rather not continue that in the image's description ;-) Carl Lindberg (talk) 02:26, 19 November 2010 (UTC)