© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. This month is the centennial
celebration of a large dam in Southern New Mexico that was officially named the
Woodrow Wilson Dam. Nope, that name didn’t stick. We know it as Elephant Butte
Dam.
The celebrations this month tell many
stories about how the Rio Grande Project was started and how the engineers constructed
the first phase of the dam, completing it by 1916. At the time it was constructed,
Elephant Butte Dam was the largest man made dam and lake in the world. Electric
generation was added in the 1930s.
But there is more to the story of
this dam. If we were alive one hundred years ago we would have been aware of German
sponsored terrorism in the United States. Most people remember the Pancho Villa
Raid on Columbus New Mexico in March 1916 but there was more terrorism going on
at that time.
There was even an attempt to destroy
Elephant Butte Dam which historians note but isn’t mentioned in any of the
celebrations. New Mexico author Eugene Rhodes wrote a story of this attempt
entitled, No Mean City, in the May 17
and 24, 1919 Saturday Evening Post.
Rhodes died in 1934. In 1975 there
was a collection of his stories published: The
Rhodes Reader: Stories of virgins, villains, and varmints. This is where I found
the story. The book is still in print at Amazon.com.
The September 11, 2001, attack on
the World Trade Center was not the first major terrorist attack on New York
City. There was a large terrorist attack on New York City at 2:08 a.m., July
30, 1916. The target was a huge munitions supply terminal called Black Tom
Island.
German terrorists attacked Black Tom
Island because it was shipping ammunition, powder and artillery shells to the Allies.
These were loaded onto ships bound for France and Great Britain.
In 1916, America was technically
neutral in the European War. However, America leaned heavily toward the Allies
by supplying munitions to the French and British. The German High Command
considered America an enemy so they created a terrorist organization inside
America.
The German saboteurs started fires
in the ammunition transportation areas. The resultant blast leveled Black Tom
Island and peppered the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel. Citizens in the New
York City area were terrorized by the explosions that broke most of the windows
in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The story is detailed in a 1989 book
by Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom:
Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914 -1917.
The perpetrators were agents of the
German government. In that era, the largest terrorist supporting government in
the world was Germany. There were more than fifty major acts of terrorism in
the United States from 1914 to 1917 sponsored by the German government.
That same month, German agents
attacked the Senate Chamber of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Several
people were killed in that attack. Financier J. P. Morgan was shot but survived
a terrorist attack. America struggled with how to control terrorism.
But what is not part of that
discussion was the attack on New Mexico’s Elephant Butte Dam. After talking to
several historians, it seems plausible that the ultimate aim of the destruction
of the dam was to keep our country home dealing with this instead of coming to
the side of France and England. Our country already had ten thousand soldiers
in Mexico trying to capture and bring to justice Pancho Villa.
Even though the Germans were engaged
in the destruction it appears there was an attempt to make it seem Mexico did
this because of our invasion of their country. Or, worse, British agents did
this to try to pin it on Germany.
In 1993 I wrote a screenplay, Hero’s Choice: between duty and honor lies
every hero’s choice. Unfortunately, the eight saboteurs were killed in the
attack on the dam so much of what I could write had to be fiction because there
were no German survivors to tell their side of the story.
Still, in celebrating the one
hundred years of Elephant Butte Dam, we should acknowledge some of the rest of
the history. It was a dangerous time back then as it is now.
Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new
novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com
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