 He nationalized the oil industry (on 18 March 1938), the electricity industry, created the National Polytechnic Institute, and started land reform and the distribution of free textbooks to children.In 1936 he exiled Calles, the last general with dictatorial ambitions, thereby removing the army from power.On the eve of World War II, the Cárdenas administration (1934–1940) was just stabilizing, and consolidating control over, a Mexican nation that, for decades, had been in revolutionary flux, and Mexicans were beginning to interpret the European battle between the communists and fascists, especially the Spanish Civil War, through their unique revolutionary lens.