Besdies FEI, look who else is turning so.

• Author: Ladd, Scott

In 1931, the United States was in financial free fall. Conventional wisdom tends to describe it as the year in which an already severe recession descended rapidly into a full-scale Depression. Unemployment shot north of 20 percent. Makeshift tent cities for the expanding ranks of America's unemployed, dubbed "Hoovervilles," sprouted outside the White House and across the country. It was a time of unprecedented hardship for tens of millions of struggling Americans.

Conventional wisdom might also suggest that a Depression is hardly the obvious time to launch a new enterprise. But some financial gamblers and farsighted entrepreneurs put that kind of thinking to the side and forged ahead anyway.

Dozens of businesses--among them Allstate Insurance Co., Sleepy's, the Clairol Co., Bridgestone Tire Co. and Turkey Hill Dairy--planted their corporate flags in 1931. They braved powerful economic headwinds and, 80 years later, are still among the operating companies, albeit having withstood waves of economic downturns, including the recent great recession.

Against this backdrop of financial upheaval, cultural change and subsequent governmental intervention, the Controllers Institute of America--which would eventually evolve into Financial Executives International--made its own debut and remains strong today.

Writing last year for the Pew Research Center, the center's senior editor Jodie T. Allen contrasted the mood of the 1930s with the U.S. today, both in political and economic terms. "The most striking difference between the 1930s and the present day is that, by the standards of today's political parlance, average Americans of the mid-1930s revealed downright 'socialistic' tendencies in many of their views about the proper role of government," she wrote.

"This outlook is in interesting contrast with many of the public's views during the Great Depression of the 1930s, not only on economic, political and social issues, but also on the role of government in addressing them."

For consumers in 1931, food prices for essentials might pale to what Americans pay today--about 14 cents a quart for milk, 9 cents for a loaf of bread and 42 cents for a pound of steak. But the average salary for a family, at least those fortunate enough to retain jobs or find new work, was plummeting in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and by 1931, had dropped to about $1,500 a year.

Despite widespread financial despair, Americans were heading to theaters in substantial...