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The metamorphosis: Once upon a time, Sugar Land was a fading company town on the banks of the Brazos River and Tom DeLay was a young exterminator in a state dominated by Democratic rule. How did we get from there to here?

Article Excerpt
In 1974 American theaters were briefly graced by a movie called The Sugarland express. Based on a true story, the film proposed the adventure of a fugitive Texas convict and his spunky harebrained wife. The two hijack a rookie state trooper in a desperate attempt to keep the state from declaring them unfit parents and putting their infant son in a foster home. Along the way, the captors and captive become buddies, and there are all sorts of other action-picture cliches--car chases, wrecks, explosions, a convincingly bewildering gunfight. But the movie stands out because the director had the good sense to slow it down. The old rodeo cowboy and character actor Ben Johnson played a highway patrol captain doing his best to rescue his dumb rookie and keep the hapless outlaws from coming to the unhappy end proposed by Texas Ranger snipers. No Dirty Harry, this guy. "I've been on the force eighteen years," drawls Johnson's cop. "It's been my good fortune not to have killed anybody in that time. That's the way I'd like to keep it" Eventually, yahoos with a "Register Communist, Not Firearms" bumper sticker intervene and pitch the story into its inevitable dark turn, but most of the movie is a comic foreshadowing of O.J. Simpson and the white Bronco.

The Sugarland Express is a minor classic, the first feature of a young director named Steven Spielberg. The filmmaker seemed to be smitten by the name "Sugarland." The town where the runaways mean to reclaim their baby is held off-camera, always luring them on, some sweet place where their family can be redeemed. When the fictional Sugarland finally materializes onscreen, it is an ordinary Southern town with broad streets and swings on front porches and a sprawling junk yard on the outskirts. It was, in fact, nothing like the real Sugar Land. Since the time Spielberg was exploring the place as a metaphor, the former company town has transformed its murky bayous into high-spurting fountains, and the malls along the highways make the town look like the world capital of Bed Bath & Beyond. It has dozens of churches, and golf courses are its parks. Middle-class voters with no stake in the Texas ways of old, nor much knowledge of or interest in the town's curious past, have poured into its massive subdivisions. Large numbers of them aren't Texans; jobs brought them to Houston. In its suburban rebirth, Sugar Land rapidly shed whatever resemblance to the one Spielberg imagined and became one of the most Republican-dominated towns in the country.

Around the time The Sugarland Express hit theaters, future congressman Tom DeLay started doing business in the real Sugar Land; he later made his home there. The coincidence is noteworthy. The House majority leader is now widely considered the most powerful member of Congress, the orchestrator of Texas's fierce...

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