Items22The creator’s order
  1. 1Benito JuárezBenito JuárezBorn 21 Mar 1806Mexico's Reform Laws of the 1850s and 1860s, which Juárez championed and enforced as president, separated church and state, created civil marriage and civil registries of births and deaths, and put Church property up for sale. The secular state they built still frames Mexican public life. The…0i
  2. 2Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnBorn 12 Feb 1809The war overshadows it, but 1862 alone gave the United States the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act that funded land-grant universities, the Pacific Railway Act and a new Department of Agriculture, and Lincoln then pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress to abolish slavery. Land-grant…0i
  3. 3José Batlle y OrdóñezJosé Batlle y OrdóñezBorn 21 May 1856Twice president of Uruguay in the early 1900s, Batlle built one of the first welfare states in the Americas: an eight-hour working day, free secondary education, legal divorce on the wife's request alone, abolition of the death penalty and state companies in banking, insurance and electricity.…0i
  4. 4Theodore RooseveltTheodore RooseveltBorn 27 Oct 1858Roosevelt's lasting domestic mark is public land. He placed around 230 million acres under federal protection, created the Forest Service and used the 1906 Antiquities Act to declare national monuments, a power presidents of both parties still use. The same year brought the Pure Food and Drug Act…0i
  5. 5Woodrow WilsonWoodrow WilsonBorn 28 Dec 1856Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, the first permanent federal income tax after the Sixteenth Amendment, the Clayton Antitrust Act and the law creating the Federal Trade Commission, all within his first two years. The central bank and the income tax remain the core of American economic…0i
  6. 6Mustafa Kemal AtatürkMustafa Kemal AtatürkFew presidents changed daily life so completely. Under Atatürk, Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet, a civil code modelled on Switzerland's that ended polygamy and gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, women's suffrage in 1934, surnames and a secular state with religious courts abolished.…0i
  7. 7Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. RooseveltBorn 30 Jan 1882The benchmark for this list. The Social Security Act of 1935 still pays pensions to most older Americans, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation still guarantees bank deposits, the Securities and Exchange Commission still polices markets and the Fair Labor Standards Act created the federal…0i
  8. 8Lázaro CárdenasLázaro CárdenasBorn 21 May 1895Cárdenas distributed around 18 million hectares of land to peasant communities through the ejido system and nationalised the oil industry in 1938, creating Pemex. The expropriation is still marked every 18 March, and Pemex remains a state company. The results are mixed: many ejidos stayed too small…0i
  9. 9Getúlio VargasGetúlio VargasBorn 19 Apr 1882The Consolidation of Labour Laws that Vargas decreed in 1943 still governs Brazilian employment, from the minimum wage and paid holidays to the signed work card that marks formal jobs. He also founded the steel company at Volta Redonda and, in his elected second term, Petrobras. The awkward fact is…0i
  10. 10Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight D. EisenhowerBorn 14 Oct 1890The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 committed the United States to the Interstate Highway System, now about 48,000 miles long and still carrying a quarter of the country's vehicle travel. Eisenhower also kept the New Deal settlement in place rather than dismantling it, extending Social Security to…0i