This paper is devoted to studying the effects of a vanishing structural damping on the controllability properties of the one dimensional linear beam equation. The vanishing term depends on a small parameter $\epsilon \in (0,1)$. We study the boundary controllability properties of this perturbed equation and the behavior of its boundary controls $v_{\epsilon }$ as $\epsilon$ goes to zero. It is shown that for any time $T$ sufficiently large but independent of $\epsilon$ and for each initial data in a suitable space there exists a uniformly bounded...