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Sphinx into Revolution, Back to Mexico from France last week "to settle down" went a little old lady whose presence rolled back the years. She was Señora Carmen Diaz, widow of detested Despot Porfirio Diaz. When she fled with him to Paris in 1911 the brilliant white Creole regime—distinctly patrician —which had reared Mexican culture to brittle heights crumpled in a blood bath of anarchy out of which spurted such gory names as Huerta, Carranza and Villa. Respectively they were an Indian general who, while quaffing flagons of cognac, butchered his way to power; a blue-spectacled and white-bearded bourgeois Dictator; and an inarticulate champion of the peasant masses whose obscure idealism found vent in tearing up the Government's railway tracks, shooting up trains and weltering in lust and blood. Out of the heroic mess which such men made of Mexico emerged two mighty figures, the bulky, one-armed rancher General Alvaro Obregón and the lantern-jawed ex-schoolteacher General Plutarco Elias Calles.
Obregón, the genial conservative of the National Revolution, was assassinated as he was about to be inaugurated President for a second term (TIME, July 30, 1928). General Calles, the dour, autocratic priest-baiter, pursues today the safe policy of eschewing a second Presidency, runs Mexico from his ranch at Cuernavaca, 40 miles from Mexico City. In 1929 with a revolution on his hands, Boss Calles stepped back into the Cabinet as Minister of War. In suppressing the Insurrectos no Mexican general was more useful than silent, ruthless Lázaro Cárdenas, "The Sphinx" who is to become President this week. Calles, notorious for almost never letting fall a word of praise, has given the new President his highest encomium, calling him tersely a "brave chief."
Starting life as a printer's devil, Lázaro Cárdenas became, at 14, a tax collector, found that too arduous and felt he had won his niche in life when he settled down as warden of a drowsy village jail. In 1913, when the hell-popping Revolution was three years old, sedentary jailing became intolerable. In patriotic disgust Jailor Cárdenas one dark night released his only prisoner and together they "joined the Revolution."
Sixty to One. Seven years later, one day before he reached the age of 25, Lázaro Cárdenas was gazetted a General of Division. As is the prerogative of Mexican generals, he asked some local merchants in the State of Veracruz for a "loan" of 20,000 pesos. They forked over the money and General Cárdenas joined Obregón and Calles in their final Putsch. It succeeded so well that six months later General Cárdenas was in a position to do handsome things. He sent an agent to the Veracruz money lenders. "But we cannot accept repayment from a great hero like General Cárdenas!" they protested. "What he now condescends to regard as a loan we always regarded as a contribution to his pure and noble cause!" The agent telegraphed to Cárdenas. Wired back the general: PAY THEM! Since then in Mexico his honesty has been a legend.