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I always thought that the upshot of FS was that the monetary intervention would have clearly saved the day. If so, this is an argument for, not against, the Fed. The recession became a Depression because of (i) the Fed's inactivity and (ii) the New Deal, i.e., a Keynesian intervention.

That's true but they clearly say that the private private clearinghouse associations did a much better job in 1907 and 1893 than the Fed did in 1929,

In his book Capitalism and Freedom, He writes on page 44:

"It is instructive to compare experience as a whole before and after (the Fed's) establishment--say from just after the Civil War to 1914 and from 1914 to date,to take two periods of roughly equal length.

"The second period was clearly the more unstable economically, whether instability is measured by the fluctuations in the stock of money, in prices, or in outputs...(E)ven if the war and immediate postwar years are omitted, and we consider only the peacetime years from, say, 1920 through 1939 and 1947 to date, the result is the same. The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before...

"...the crude comparison should at least give the reader pause before he takes for granted, as is so often done, that an agency as long established, as powerful, as pervasive as the Federal Reserve System is performing a necessary and desirable fundtion and is contributing to the attainment of the objective for which it was established."

He also said we should get rid of the Fed but I can't remember where or when.

Sorry, have to disagree on the clearinghouses doing a better job in 1907. The clearinghouses were done, finished, out-of-cash. That's when J.P. Morgan was called. It was Morgan's own reserves (and others like Rockefeller) that were used to backstop the failing trusts. Even these guys were running out of cash. The last gasp measure that saved the day was a Newspaper/Clergy campaign to reach the citizenry and instill some confidence. The campaign worked. Otherwise, the runs would have continued. Again, the clearinghouses were cooked before the Panic was quelled.

I'm not arguing that the Fed did even a good job in 1929-33. But, outside of the bank runs during both panics, the comparison is not valid. 1907 was a panic resulting from an attempt to corner the copper market. Great Depression was a global debt-deflation.