I think I may have been conflating a few things

Bernanke I think changed his mind about how aggressive the fed needed to be in order to avoid the depression. But I hadn't realized Friedman advocated a large QE program for Japan when it was in its slump, so Bernanke might say that friedman was right and he should have expanded the money supply earlier and faster.

I'm also attaching an article below talking about the parallels between the Depression and Great Recession. In each case the fed raised rates for seemingly reasonable reasons (commodity prices driving pre recession inflation, popping the stock market bubble). In each case the financial system was silently imploding in the background. For us housing prices were dripping in 06 and in the Depression non American economic activity was already declining and American interest hikes forced interest rates up abroad.

In both cases all hell breaks loose and the system propagates the financial impulse propagates. In both cases you had initial easing in interest rates and some bank bailouts. In each case the fed/government let an important financial institution fail and all hell broke loose. Here's an excerpt in case you're pay walled.

"contrary to popular memory, Eichengreen suggests, the Depression-era Fed deserves at least some sympathy. In the wake of the 1929 crash, the Fed acted immediately to pump liquidity into the markets, saving the banking system from failure. It cut interest rates repeatedly in the first half of 1930, sparking a partial recovery on Wall Street. Confronted with a string of bank runs, which were inevitably common in the era before deposit insurance, the Fed supplied yet more liquidity to fragile banks, staving off a wider crisis. Eugene Meyer, the formidable Fed chairman who later ran the World Bank and bought The Washington Post, drafted the legislation creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the counterpart to the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008. When a major Chicago bank, Central Republic, threatened to collapse in June 1932, Meyer used the RFC to mount an unprecedented, $90 million rescue. That was three times the size of all federal loans to the states that year for the relief of the unemployed and homeless."

But my overall point was that the fed could not have pursued sufficiently expansionary policy given political restraints and you needed sufficient private sector bail outs. Hoover wasn't willing to do that for ideological reasons.

Had Roosevelt been in charge he probably makes similar mistakes. The Gold Standard was orthodoxy back then and I think we've seen how toxic bank bail outs are. Roosevelt even tried to balance the budget before we were really out of the Depression.

I see Hoover like a worse Carter. He could have done better, but was in a wrong place wrong time situation. Had he played the situation perfectly we'd still have done poorly and he'd still have lost. He just wouldn't be seen as one of our worst presidents.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/how-the-fed-flubbed-it/383496/

Click here for link at https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/bernank