Ten Leaders Who Redirected Their States, from Lincoln to de Klerk

Lincoln was President from 1861 until his assassination in 1865 and led the Union through the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 declared enslaved people in Confederate-held territory free, and his political career had been shaped by his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas over the Dred Scott decision.

Bismarck was the first chancellor of a unified Germany, serving from 1871 to 1890. Between 1883 and 1889 his government enacted compulsory insurance against sickness, workplace accidents, old age and disability, a program he pursued chiefly to weaken the socialist movement's appeal to workers.

Roosevelt served as President from 1933 until his death in 1945, longer than any other president. His New Deal answered the Great Depression with relief, recovery and reform, including the Social Security Act of 1935, while his Executive Order 9066 of February 1942 authorized the incarceration of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans.

Cardenas was President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. He redistributed more land to peasant communities than all his predecessors combined, nationalized the foreign-owned oil companies on 18 March 1938 into what became Pemex, and in 1938 reorganized the ruling party into the corporatist structure from which the Institutional Revolutionary Party descended.

Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 and led Britain through the Second World War, refusing to negotiate with Nazi Germany while Britain stood largely alone. His record also includes opposition to Indian self-government and wartime policies that a 2019 study linked primarily to the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated three million people died.

Attlee led Labour to a landslide in the July 1945 general election, defeating Churchill's wartime coalition within months of victory in Europe, an ordinary and peaceful transfer of power. As Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951 his government created the National Health Service and nationalized coal, rail and steel.

Allende won Chile's 1970 election and became the first democratically elected Marxist president in Latin America. His government pursued nationalization and redistribution while trying to preserve democratic institutions, and it ended in the military coup of 11 September 1973 led by Augusto Pinochet, in which he died.

Deng became China's paramount leader in the late 1970s without holding its most senior formal titles and began the Reform and Opening Up program, which placed state enterprises alongside private and foreign investment. He was also the senior leader who decided in June 1989 to deploy the military against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, with a death toll that remains disputed.

Gorbachev led the Soviet Union as General Secretary from 1985 to 1991 and as president in 1990 and 1991. His glasnost and perestroika opened the political system, and his reforms contributed to the end of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

De Klerk was the last state president under the apartheid constitution, serving from 1989 to 1994. On 2 February 1990 he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela, then negotiated the transition to the April 1994 election, and shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.