The “One Bad Apple” Theory in American Politics

I blame the Osmonds. Yes, the tediously nice vocal group from Ogden, Utah. Their 1970 number-one hit “One Bad Apple” popularized the follow-up line “...don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” an attitude which continues to dominate whenever anybody uses the Bad Apple analogy. It’s just one individual, the thinking goes; we can’t condemn everybody in the same category because that individual is rotten!

This, however, is a complete reversal of the original axiom. Some version of the idea has existed since at least Geoffrey Chaucer, who, in “The Cook’s Tale,” records a wordier, less direct version of the idea. It was recorded by Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, in 1736, as “a rotten apple spoils his companions.” In source, the aphorism contends that one bad apple does spoil the whole barrel.

Perhaps it seems silly, splitting hairs this way when the “one bad apple” theory has been employed to excuse the Minneapolis Police Department following George Floyd’s death. One tainted individual, Officer Derek Chauvin, doesn’t prove the entire PD, or the concept of policing, is irrevocably contaminated, we hear. Let’s just purge the individual and continue! We can’t blame every cop everywhere because one lawman is a killer.

Except I think it matters. The metaphors we employ in moments of deep struggle condition our thinking. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote, nearly twenty years ago, that linguistic metaphors define how we, as humans, think. When we define “one bad apple” as an easily removed outlier, like killer cop Derek Chauvin, we allow ourselves to excuse massive injustices as anomalies. That isn’t what this metaphor means.

The primarily agrarian audiences for whom Chaucer and Franklin wrote, would’ve understood firsthand that fruit rot transfers on contact. They wouldn’t have had our post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge that rotting apples emit ethylene, a chemical that hastens fruit ripening, and eventually over-ripening. But they would’ve known, without needing it explained, that one bad apple needs removed from a barrel and destroyed immediately. Otherwise, the entire barrel starts rotting.

Like all metaphors, this one only stretches so far. It makes apples a category, but this category needs to be sufficiently compressed to actually count. Apples in an orchard don’t spread rot unless the tree is somehow damaged; only when they’re harvested and stored in a barrel does fruit rot become directly contagious. Thus, like the Osmonds sang, one heartbreak doesn’t make every romantic love equally doomed.

The Osmonds, circa 1970

But if we compare men overall, as the Osmonds do, with a category of men who’ve undergone the same training and do the same job, we make the transfer from orchard-fresh apples to the barrel. Because of the intensity of police training, the length and relative impunity of careers, and the difficulty of what they do, police are in many ways confined together. They become apples in a barrel.

Which makes purging rotten apples from the barrel even more important. Derek Chauvin, we now know, has a lengthy history of on-the-job abuse, including multiple shootings and some civilian deaths. His organization has systematically covered his ass for over a decade. This perfectly captures what Chaucer and Franklin meant about bad apples: the rot has clearly transferred onto others, including the cops who silently watched George Floyd’s death.

If Derek Chauvin were merely “one bad apple,” he’d need removed from policing immediately. He’s clearly internalized a mentality of domination: standing on someone’s neck is a longstanding metaphor for oppression, even when it isn’t so literal. But Derek Chauvin isn’t “one bad apple”; the fact that his system has protected him for years, the fact that he remains a badge-wearing law officer, demonstrates that the rot has already spread.

Smarter commentators than me have observed how American police work has adopted a warrior cop culture. Whenever someone like George Floyd, Philando Castile, Walker Scott, or Sandra Bland dies in police hands, with cameras rolling, we hear that one death resulted from “one bad apple.” But we only know about these deaths, and their palpable injustice, because we saw them. By that time, it’s already too late to prevent this horrific violence.

As an ex-English teacher, I consider metaphors important. Which metaphors we employ, and how we employ them, speak volumes to our thinking. The phrase “one bad apple” has, in recent years, become intensely associated with bad policing. Perhaps we need to employ a new metaphor: “the cockroach in the kitchen.” Because by the time we see one, it’s already too late; there are thousands of larvae living in the walls.