The Federal Reserve didn’t do anything to cause the Depression, so Friedman and Schwartz state in their Monetary History of the US.
The problem with the Fed was their failure to act in response to a series of panics that were wiping out sound banks. The panics began with the 1930 failure of Bank of the United States, a private bank whose name led people into thinking the country itself was in trouble.
The Fed needed to flood those banks with liquidity so that panicking customers would feel that they could always get their money and quit pulling it out- that disintermediation had the effect of shrinking the money supply. Even worse was what happened to depositors when banks did fail, there was no FDIC to keep their deposits from simply vanishing.
We had the Fordney McCumber tariff during most of the 1920s and it was little different from Smoot Hawley. If Smoot Hawley is such a big deal then those making that argument need to explain why the 1922 tariff accompanied eight years of boom times.
Foreign trade in that era amounted to less that 5% of the economy IIRC. We were virtually a self sufficient economy.
You need to read Murray Newton Rothbard’s work on the Great Depression if you think the Federal Reserve had no effect on the economy of the 1920’s and 30’s.
https://www.libertyclassroom.com/depression/
Rothbard would maintain that the FED allowed the speculative bubble to build and then allowed the depression to deepen after the bank failures. The FED has continually mismanaged over the years which is another reason to be skeptical of any group of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers or even economists trying to run our lives.
This tariff issue reminds me of the early seventies when Nixon started the wage and price controls because of the ravings of the democrats and a few economically ignorant Republicans. It was a disaster. What temporary salutary effects it may have had at the beginning were soon followed by massive inflation.
Tariffs may not be as bad but it is still not good. It’s like another tax increase and will cause the price of most goods using steel and aluminum to rise.