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.
The more that I read about Calvin Coolidge and how he dealt with the Panic of 1920, the more impressed I am with him. He shared a whole lot of attributes with Dwight Eisenhower so far as how they governed in the White House... attributes that I personally wish the current resident of that palace on Pennsylvania Avenue would pay attention to. Heck, attributes I wish the last three residents had.
I agree with you too that I think Roosevelt's intervention policies likely prolonged that recession and turned it into a full fledged depression. I've wondered myself a sort of "what if" had Congress and the White House simply left well enough alone over the past two years, would America be in the middle of a major recovery right now or not? My own gut feeling is that the monkeying around with tax rates, increasing regulations, and pouring insane levels of money into the economy (from both congressional actions and actions by the Fed like QE2) are only going to be shooting themselves in the foot. Talk of hyperinflation certainly has a sound basis of fact.