The White House privately urged keeping the stock exchange open during the crash

Evidence

As arbitrageurs’ purchases began, the programs, noted in chapter 1, that corporations were announcing to buy back their stock also started to have effects. Gradually, New York’s specialists received enough “buy” orders to resume trading. Phelan had wanted to keep the New York Stock Exchange open. That morning he had received a private appeal from the White House not to shut the exchange, and he also feared that closure might be permanent. “If we close it,” he later recalled thinking, “we [will] never open it.” — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 839