Is the United States, or are the United States?
If one were to consult nearly every textbook written on the subject of the United States after the Reconstruction era, one would certainly choose the former grammatical arrangement by default. Consensus seems to have it: the United States is. But what performs the action is? Is it the “United” or the “States”? Traditional logic seems to fly in the face of post–Civil War standard American English, because logic would not allow us to make the “Union” that hides in the shadows behind the adjective “United” perform the verb that the States are supposed to be performing of their own volition.[1] Only “States” can perform an action when the noun phrase “United States” appears in the subject position. Clearly, the United States are, and they are by the rules of logic.
This problem in the application of subject-verb agreement may seem like a small quibble, but perhaps every issue at stake in the American political scene between the era of the Civil War and today’s increasing mess of government intervention can be boiled down to this same grammatical quandary. Is the United States, or are the United States? The difference lies in where we can place the power of action. Do the states, as the representatives of the people, have that power, or does the unitary power of the federal government retain a monopoly on the power of action?
In 1903, one particularly perplexed grammarian of the states’-rights position tried to tackle this issue in a letter to Harper’s Weekly. Alarmed by the change in grammar, which seemed to be making its way into the state machinery, he wrote,
It seems to be practically impossible to convince some persons of what ought to be self-evident, namely, that the text of the Constitution of the United States cannot be altered or amended in the slightest particular except by the machinery for emendation expressly provided in the text of the document itself. A paragraph is going the rounds of the press to the effect that the question whether the “United States” should be regarded as a plural or as a singular noun has been definitely settled by the Committee on the Revision of the Laws, which, it seems, in reviewing the Federal Statutes, has presumed to decide that the United States is.[2]
James Madison, the great architect of the Constitution, preferred are to that consolidated is precisely for the reason that the United States are not the singular United State.[3] Indeed, the “United State” has the ring of something dark and ominous, perhaps something not unlike Mussolini’s conception of the state as a unico mystico of man and government machinery: “No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State.”
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