You may be interested in this earlier comment by u/Integralds on the economics profession's view of the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis, that the US's Federal Reserve unintentionally and unknowingly caused the Great Depression by cutting the money supply.

I'll add to that that I would be inclined to be suspicious of any text book that makes a sweeping statement about a very loosely-defined thing like "free-market capitalism" causing a Depression. Some people use capitalism to mean free-markets in the sense of Adam Smith or Milton Friedman and some people use capitalism to include things like large corporations lobbying for government subsidies and regulations and other interventions. Like most things in history, capitalism is complex.

I'd just add to the discussion by saying that while the Federal Reserve's gold sterilization decision contributed to a dramatic credit crunch, it's important to clarify that economy was nonetheless due for a contraction: easy credit, speculative investing, and overproduction all existed and contributed to an inevitable recession. The Fed's decision regarding sterilization merely made a bad situation worse. I've written about the topic in this past answer aggregating two other older answers of mine, which you might be interested in.