The only reason that I don't go to greater lengths to correct your misunderstandings of economic history is that I grow weary of doing so on online forums without due compensation.  Not just for yourself, as economics is a widely misunderstood subject even among those who consider themselves well educated.  This is something that I've often viewed as strange, considering it's not really a complicated subject to understand from a scientific perspective; but too many try to view it from the macro side and then overcomplicate it.

The contraction of the money supply in that general time period is not what caused the Great Depression.  The contraction of the money supply was the concurrent remedy to the malinvestment that was rampant in the decade that preceded the Great Depression, which was itself caused by excessive expansion of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve banking system from it's conception in 1913 to 1929, but mostly after 1924.  Most of the human suffering during the Great Depression was the direct result of attempts by the US Government to intervene in the natural corrective process of deflation, rather than simply stay out of the way and let the nation take it's hard medicine and move on.  The Great Depression was, largely, a political event as opposed to an economic or fiscal event; and the parallels to the current state of things is striking.  For a wonderful counter example, look at the Panic of 1920, and the similarities and differences in how that was handled by the two administrations.