Another thoughful post.
Your comments highlight why Monetarist economics is simply not true.
too much emphasis is put upon money policy as a driver of events, and too little emphasis is put upon money policy as a symptom of events
Charles Rist's views are typical of pre-Monetarist economics. These economists understood the 1920s quite differently to Monetarists.
WW-I created a massive amount of new investments in the farm and manufacturing sector - which were economically successful only while the needs of WW-I were present. Once the war was over, the capital invested in these projects was effectively destroyed. The central banks attempted to prop things up with the creation of tremendous amounts of debt creation - creating financial bubbles rather than prosperity. It was inevitable that this failed. As Schumpeter described it, this turned what should have been a bad economic recession after WW-I into the "hollow prosperity" of the 1920s.
The money supply for Charles Rist, is the representation of the economy's capital. For an economy where a large percentage of its capital/money was destroyed in bad investments, the Great Depression was inevitable. Expanding debt levels cannot replace the destruction of capital/money, anymore than mailing everyone a million in cash can make everyone rich.
Greatly expanding debt levels merely postponed the Depression and made it worse. As Schumpeter said, economic policy doesn't permit a choice between Depression or no Depression - only a choice between Depression now, or worse Depression later.
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In contrast, Milton Friedman observed that Fed greatly expanded the debt/money supply during the 1920s and early part of the Great Depression. But Friedman also noted this large increase in debt/money was insufficient to offset the reduction in money turnover (monetary velocity) as people quite logically panicked and stopped spending when the Great Depression began to grip.
While Friedman correctly observed that the effective debt/money supply declined as the Great Depression began. He then made a logical error and assumed the converse must be true.
Friedman developed the logically insupportable hypothesis that greatly increasing the debt/money supply, to offset the decline in monetary velocity, would have prevented the economic depression.
I'm sure you can see how absurd this hypothesis is. Dropping large amounts of currency from dirigibles, or issuing millions of new loans, would not have solved the underlying problems in the economy of the 1920s. Charles Rist would have been glad to set Friedman straight.
Unfortunately this nonsense provides the basis for the actions of the Fed and most other central banks, and the writing of Monetarist based economists.
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