Lots of other things changed between 1900 in the midwest and post 1913 America. I think it's wrong to attribute to much to the Fed, either negative or positive. A lot of the boom / bust was tied to agriculture, which didn't benefit from electricity much, and therefore immigration. Certainly the "National Bank" period when there was no central bank was filled with problems. But then the Great Depression took place 20 years AFTER the Fed. Again, economies are big complex systems that defy simple cause and effect explanations. This is why economics is called 'the dismal science'.
LOL. "and therefore immigration" should say "and therefore IRRIGATION" Oops.
That's why I referred to the "phasing in the FRB in the 20th century". Better still, we might even say it was the Fed's phasing out the gold standard that did it.
In 1922 we still had gold money that looked like this. We had the Fed but still no monetary control to speak of, either de jure or de facto. The fed was still clueless into the 30's when the fit hit the shan and Rosevelt got elected and finally ended gold clauses in gov't contracts and made the dollar something people could actually use. That very day the stock market leaped ten percent and another the next day. Over all, evolution was still slow.
The final breakthrough was '72 with ditching the Breton-Wood's international gold standard. A gradual process was all that was possible I suppose given everyone's phobia for change, but looking back we see ourselves a lot better off with prices finally under control. Sure, a lot of other things got better too, but it's virtually impossible to imagine the other benefits if we still also had pre-Fed chaos.
