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Cárdenas, a socialist-idealist, turned out to be no puppet. He threw Calles out of the country and carried on the revolution. He nationalized the oil industry, expropriated the huge haciendas. Peasants took the land that had fed the nation, used it at first to feed only themselves. Finally, the country's communal-farm system evolved.
Cárdenas' successor, Manuel Avila Camacho, got Mexico's industrialization into full swing during World War II. To fight the war, the U.S. needed everything that Mexico produced—cotton, metals, ores. The railroads were antiquated and creaky, but at least they were submarine-proof. U.S. dollars tumbled in, exports rumbled out. Many rich ex-landowners built factories to produce the goods Mexico could no longer import.
After the war, President Miguel Alemán plunged into deficit-spending on spectacular airports, dams, power plants. He winked at corruption in government, got rich quick. Puritanical Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who followed Alemán in 1952, took the role of consolidator. He hooked up power lines and irrigation canals to Alemán's dams, cleaned up corruption, opened new areas for food growing. Quietly, he encouraged foreign investors to flood into Mexico with capital, machinery, ideas to feed the boom that incoming President Adolfo López Mateos inherited this week.