--- title: "Vanguard: Ang & Chinoy (2026)" description: >- Distilled: using random variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, Ang and Chinoy provide the first causal evidence that military service nearly tripled Black veterans' likelihood of joining the NAACP, driven by institutional discrimination rather than socioeconomic gains. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 141(1), 2026, paywalled. Seven core results with source locators, datasets used, the IV design, and the estimating equations. sidebar: label: Ang-Chinoy 2026 order: 1 tags: [paper-summary, civil-rights, race-discrimination, economic-history, political-economy, military-service, instrumental-variables, panel-regression, peer-reviewed, unreplicated, data:ww1-draft-cards, data:naacp-papers-proquest, data:vami, data:ats-records, data:census] paper: authors: Desmond Ang, Sahil Chinoy authorList: - { family: Ang, given: Desmond, orcid: "0000-0003-3500-9024", affiliation: Harvard University } - { family: Chinoy, given: Sahil, affiliation: Harvard University } year: 2026 venue: The Quarterly Journal of Economics 141(1), 2026, 795-844 venueShort: QJE 2026 doi: 10.1093/qje/qjaf046 jel: codes: [N42, N32, D71, D74, J15, Z13] assignedBy: paper date: 2026-06-28 topics: ["Race, History, and American Society"] dataAccess: licensed-commercial outcome: - NAACP membership among Black WWI veterans - community leadership prominence in the New Negro era - voter participation among Black WWI veterans outcomeClass: [civic-participation] license: "All rights reserved. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College, (c) The Author(s) 2025; Crossref license entry: Oxford CHORUS standard publication model (content-version vor, URL https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model, delay-in-days 0, start 2025-09-23)" licenseShort: paywalled access: paywalled machineAccess: "blocked-paywall (OUP/QJE site; Crossref confirms CHORUS standard publication model, not a CC licence; 2026-06-28)" redistribution: extract-only resultsCount: 7 citedByCount: 1 introducesData: true methods: role: applies-method family: reduced-form-causal buildsFrom: [instrumental-variables, panel-regression] identification: instrument contributionType: [new-data, new-fact] mechanisms: [disparate-treatment, discrimination-radicalization] scope: region: US period: 1917..1940 frequency: annual dataType: [administrative, text] granularity: [individual] n: "204,923 draft registrants linked to the 1930 census; 3,765 identified NAACP members (1.8%)" findings: - { ref: R1, outcome: NAACP membership among Black WWI veterans, metric: pp-effect, value: "2SLS 0.0282** (SE 0.0118); baseline nonveteran mean 1.6%, implied veteran rate 4.4%", direction: positive, vsBenchmark: "nearly triple the 1.6% nonveteran baseline (Table III col. 4, p. 817)" } - { ref: R2, outcome: NAACP membership duration, metric: pp-effect, value: "2SLS ~0.01 for 7+ years of participation; 1 in 100 draftees induced to remain a member more than 7 years (Figure IV, p. 820)", direction: positive } - { ref: R3, outcome: community leadership prominence in the New Negro era, metric: probability, value: "2SLS point estimate implies nearly 3x higher probability of community leader recognition; similar magnitude across both biographical databases (Online Appendix Table A.III)", direction: positive } - { ref: R4, outcome: "socioeconomic outcomes (literacy, home ownership, income, employment)", metric: coefficient, value: "all 2SLS estimates near zero; CIs rule out gains above 0.10 SD in occupational income (~$88 in 1950 dollars) (Figure V, p. 823)", direction: none } - { ref: R5, outcome: NAACP membership among Black WWI veterans, metric: coefficient, value: "2SLS increases from ~0 (Q1, smallest Black-white induction rate gap) to ~0.08 (Q4, largest gap) (Figure VIII, p. 830)", direction: positive, vsBenchmark: "near-zero for registrants from equitable draft boards" } - { ref: R6, outcome: NAACP membership among Black WWI veterans, metric: coefficient, value: "2SLS ~0.10 for men at camps with 0-25% Black NCO share or no Black troop training; ~0 for camps where majority of NCOs are Black or training was provided (Figure IX, p. 832)", direction: positive, vsBenchmark: "near-zero for men assigned to less discriminatory camps" } - { ref: R7, outcome: voter participation among Black WWI veterans, metric: pp-effect, value: "OLS 24pp higher voting for veterans citing injustice vs those who did not; injustice is the single strongest predictor; all other themes insignificant or borderline (Figure XI, p. 836)", direction: positive, vsBenchmark: "all other veteran survey themes statistically insignificant or borderline" } resultType: new-finding relatesTo: - { cite: 'Angrist and Krueger (1994)', relation: builds-on, note: 'draft lottery instrument strategy for military service; Vietnam-era design adapted here for WWI serial-number lottery' } - { cite: 'Greenberg et al. (2022)', doi: '10.1093/qje/qjac026', relation: tests, note: 'modern military as engine of Black economic mobility; WWI context yields near-zero socioeconomic effects, separating discrimination from opportunity channels' } - { cite: 'Angrist and Chen (2011)', doi: '10.1257/app.3.2.96', relation: cites, note: 'Vietnam-era GI Bill schooling gains; human capital channel ruled out for WWI by near-zero income and education effects' } - { cite: 'Mettler (2002)', doi: '10.1017/s0003055402000217', relation: cites, note: 'WWII GI Bill and civic engagement via policy feedback; mechanism distinguished from WWI where no comparable benefits existed' } - { cite: 'Williams (2007)', doi: '10.1086/jaahv92n3p347', relation: builds-on, note: 'historical narrative that racial discrimination in the WWI military catalyzed Black postwar racial militancy; paper provides first causal evidence corroborating this account' } - { cite: 'Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (2012)', doi: '10.1257/aer.102.5.1832', relation: builds-on, note: 'ABE historical record linkage procedure used to link draft cards and NAACP rosters to the 1930 census' } - { cite: 'Bazzi et al. (2023)', doi: '10.3386/w31331', relation: builds-on, note: 'Confederate Culture Index adapted to construct county-level racial prejudice measure for heterogeneity analysis' } openQuestions: - "Whether the strong county-level correlation between Black veteran shares and NAACP membership among non-drafted registrants implies large indirect spillover effects on community activism in the New Negro era beyond the direct 2SLS estimate (p. 838)." - "How Black veterans' WWI experiences influenced participation in the civil rights achievements of the 1940s and 1950s, given that key features of Black WWI service were echoed in WWII (p. 838)." - "Spillover effects to other political domains: early Gallup surveys suggest Black WWI veterans held distinctive views on U.S. imperialism and federal domestic intervention, pointing to potential effects beyond the civil rights arena (pp. 838-839)." replicationCode: url: "https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LSPICA" status: available extraction: - { by: "paper-distiller (claude-sonnet-4-6)", date: 2026-06-28, role: extracted, note: "Full PDF read (pp. 795-844); seven core results extracted from Tables I-III, Figures IV-V, VIII-XI. Not human-verified. Not reproduced. Replication data available at Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LSPICA)." } - { by: paper-verifier (claude-sonnet-4-6), date: 2026-06-28, role: verified, note: "Locators and magnitudes re-checked against PDF; three fixes applied: JEL codes corrected to full paper list (N42,N32,D71,D74,J15,Z13); Williams (2007) quote attributed to correct page (350→351); Mettler (2002) body mention added to satisfy relatesTo locatability." } licenceVerification: - { source: "Crossref REST API works/10.1093/qje/qjaf046", checked: 2026-06-28, by: "paper-distiller (claude-sonnet-4-6)", found: "license[].content-version=vor, URL=https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model, delay-in-days=0, start=2025-09-23; NOT a CC licence. PDF (pp. 795, 844) confirms All rights reserved." } rightsSignalConflict: false --- **What this is.** The paper's core results, the identification strategy (WWI draft lottery as instrument for veteran status), the estimating equations, and the mechanism tests: enough to know what the paper found and how, without reading all 50 pages. To replicate or extend it, read the full source at the [original](https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf046). ## TL;DR Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, assigned primarily to racially segregated labor units under white supervisors. Ang and Chinoy (2026) leverage random variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military records, NAACP membership rosters, and census data to estimate the causal effect of military service on postwar civil rights activism. Two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates show that Black men randomly induced to enlist were nearly three times more likely to join the nascent NAACP than comparable nonveterans from the same draft board (baseline mean 1.6% vs implied veteran rate 4.4%), with a first-stage F-statistic of 565. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies the draft induced approximately 10,000 Black men to join the NAACP, about 20% of the organization's 1940 membership. These effects are not explained by residential mobility or improved socioeconomic status: near-zero effects on literacy, income, and employment are consistent with the limited training and scant postwar benefits provided to Black WWI soldiers (in contrast to the human capital gains documented for Vietnam-era veterans by Angrist and Chen (2011) and for modern volunteers by Greenberg et al. (2022)). Rather, effects increase monotonically with measures of discriminatory treatment in the draft and in military camps, consistent with the historical account of Williams (2007) that perceptions of injustice catalyzed Black postwar activism in the New Negro era. ## Core results Magnitudes and significance are as reported; `\*\*` = 5%. All 2SLS specifications instrument veteran status with the scaled draft lottery order number and include draft board fixed effects; standard errors clustered by serial number. | # | Result | Locator | Magnitude | |---|---|---|---| | R1 | Military service nearly **tripled NAACP membership** among Black draftees relative to comparable nondraftees from the same board | Table III, col. 4, p. 817 | 2SLS: 0.0282\*\* (SE 0.0118); baseline nonveteran mean 1.6%, implied veteran rate 4.4%; first-stage F = 565.1 | | R2 | Draftees were induced into **lasting NAACP participation**: 1 in 100 Black draftees participated for more than 7 years | Figure IV, p. 820 | 2SLS coefficient ~0.01 for 7+ years of membership; 95% CI excludes zero through at least 7 years | | R3 | Military service nearly **tripled the probability of becoming a historically prominent community leader** in the New Negro era | Online Appendix Table A.III, p. 820 | 2SLS point estimate comparable to NAACP membership effect; similar magnitude across both biographical databases | | R4 | **Near-zero socioeconomic effects**: serving in WWI did not improve Black soldiers' literacy, home ownership, employment, or income | Figure V, Panel A, p. 823 | All 2SLS estimates statistically insignificant; CIs rule out occupational income gains above 0.10 SD (~$88 in 1950 dollars) | | R5 | NAACP effects increase **monotonically with draft board racial bias**: near-zero for equitable boards, large for the most discriminatory | Figure VIII, p. 830 | 2SLS: ~0 for Q1 (smallest Black-white induction rate gap); ~0.08 for Q4 (largest gap) | | R6 | Large NAACP effects for men at **most discriminatory camps** (denying Black soldiers training and promotion); near-zero for less discriminatory camps | Figure IX, p. 832 | 2SLS ~0.10 for camps with 0-25% Black NCO share or no Black troop training; ~0 when majority of NCOs are Black or training was provided | | R7 | **Injustice is the sole survey theme** significantly predictive of voter participation: veterans citing injustice were 24 percentage points more likely to vote | Figure XI, p. 836 | OLS coefficient ~0.24 on the injustice theme; all other themes statistically insignificant or borderline; robust to controls for birth year, birth state, county, and prior military experience | **Overall (paper's conclusion).** Military service causally increased Black Americans' participation in the early civil rights movement. The effect is not driven by skill acquisition or economic improvement, but by soldiers' encounters with systematic racial discrimination in the draft and in segregated military camps, which catalyzed organized political resistance in the New Negro era. The draft likely induced approximately 10,000 Black men to join the NAACP, accounting for roughly 20% of its 1940 membership. ## Theory / model The paper has no formal economic model. It tests two competing mechanisms for how military service could affect civil rights activism: **Mechanism 1 (Human capital / socioeconomic mobility).** Military service provides formal training, organizational skills, income, and social networks that lower the cost of civic participation. This predicts positive effects on income and education alongside NAACP membership, and effects concentrated among soldiers who received more training. **Mechanism 2 (Discrimination-induced radicalization).** Experiences of institutional racism in the draft process (racial bias in induction rates, denial of exemptions) and in segregated military camps (exclusion from training, leadership, and equal treatment) catalyze perceptions of injustice and political resistance. This predicts effects concentrated among soldiers who experienced the most discrimination, with no corresponding socioeconomic gains. The paper's evidence supports Mechanism 2 and rules out Mechanism 1 throughout: - Near-zero effects on all socioeconomic outcomes (R4); - Effects increasing with draft board racial bias in induction rates (R5); - Large effects at camps denying Black soldiers training and promotion; near-zero at less discriminatory camps (R6); - Injustice as the sole survey theme predictive of postwar civic engagement (R7). This also rules out a policy-feedback channel of the kind Mettler (2002) documents for the WWII GI Bill, since no comparable postwar benefits extended to Black WWI soldiers. These results are consistent with the historical account of Williams (2007, p. 351) that "systematic discrimination during military service politicized black soldiers" and their "postwar disillusionment" drove racial militancy in the New Negro era. **Identification.** The WWI draft lottery supplies quasi-random variation in military service. Six weeks after the first registration (June 5, 1917), paper slips containing serial numbers 1-10,500 were drawn in a national lottery; the rank of each man's serial number among those at his draft board determined his induction order. The authors infer order numbers from serial numbers, board size, and the national drawing sequence. The instrument is exogenous by construction: Figure III, Panel B (p. 816) shows all prewar registrant characteristics (exemption claim, marital status, occupation) have coefficients below 0.01 standard deviations on the scaled order number, all statistically insignificant. Unlike the Vietnam and WWII draft lotteries examined in Angrist and Krueger (1994) and related work, the WWI lottery was based on registration serial numbers rather than birth dates, generating variation within draft boards rather than within birth cohorts. ## Method The paper applies 2SLS using the scaled draft lottery order number as an instrument for veteran status. It builds on `instrumental-variables` for the causal identification strategy and `panel-regression` for the fixed-effects specification with clustered standard errors. Historical record linkage across administrative databases follows Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (2012), henceforth ABE, requiring exact matches on birth state and name initials with close alignment on full names and birth years. For the heterogeneity analysis, county-level racial prejudice is measured using a version of the Confederate Culture Index adapted from Bazzi et al. (2023). **First stage** (equation 2, p. 815): $$\text{Veteran}_i = \delta_b + \gamma \, \text{Order}_i + X_i'\Lambda + v_i \tag{2}$$ Here $$\text{Order}_i$$ is registrant $$i$$'s inferred order number scaled by the total number of registrants in his draft board, so $$\text{Order}_i \in [0,1]$$ with lower values indicating earlier lottery draws and greater induction likelihood. $$\delta_b$$ are draft board fixed effects that restrict the variation to within-board comparisons; $$X_i$$ are prewar individual controls (birth year, state of birth, prewar occupation, exemption claim interacted with marital status). Standard errors are clustered by serial number throughout. Figure III, Panel A (p. 816) shows the first-stage binned scatterplot: slope = -0.088 (SE 0.0038). The gap in veteran likelihood between men with the lowest and highest order numbers is approximately 10 percentage points. First-stage F-statistics range from 534 to 565 across the main specifications (Table III, p. 817). ## Empirical specifications **Main specification** (equation 1, p. 813): $$\text{NAACP}_i = \lambda_b + \beta \, \text{Veteran}_i + X_i'\Gamma + u_i \tag{1}$$ where $$\text{NAACP}_i$$ indicates whether individual $$i$$ appears in NAACP membership rosters between the end of WWI and 1939; $$\text{Veteran}_i$$ is an indicator combining the 1930 census self-report and VAMI/ATS military record matches; $$\lambda_b$$ are draft board fixed effects; and $$X_i$$ are prewar controls. Veteran status is instrumented with $$\text{Order}_i$$ from equation (2). Analysis sample: 204,923 draft registrants linked to the 1930 census. The preferred specification (Table III, column 4) adds 1930 county fixed effects to rule out residential mobility during the Great Migration as a confound; the 2SLS coefficient is 0.0282\*\* (SE 0.0118, first-stage F = 565.1). The OLS coefficient (0.0034-0.0044) is appreciably smaller, consistent with measurement error in veteran status attenuating the first-stage slope and with civic-minded volunteers being less inclined to join organizations that challenged the government. **Heterogeneity by discrimination (R5, R6).** Equation (1) is estimated separately for quartiles of the board-level Black-white induction rate gap (Figure VIII, p. 830) and for bins of camp discrimination measures derived from Military Intelligence Division reports: share of Black noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in Black units and share of Black soldiers receiving military training (Figure IX, p. 832). Camp assignment is predicted for all registrants, including non-draftees, using a crosswalk linking draft boards to camp recruitment areas via National Geographic maps and Southern draft call lists. Bazzi et al. (2023)'s approach for measuring historical racial prejudice is adapted to the county level to measure prewar racial context (Figure VI, p. 826). **Socioeconomic outcomes (R4).** The same 2SLS specification is applied to standardized outcomes from the 1930 and 1940 censuses: literacy, home ownership, employment, occupational income score, wage and salary income in 1940, and college attendance. All estimates are near zero and statistically insignificant (Figure V, p. 823); confidence intervals rule out occupational income gains above 0.10 standard deviations. **Survey analysis (R7).** Multivariate OLS regression of self-reported voter participation on indicators for narrative themes from Virginia and Connecticut WWI veterans' questionnaires, using approximately 1,300 Black army veterans who returned surveys with non-missing responses. Standard errors are heteroskedasticity-robust. Injustice mentions yield a 24 percentage point coefficient, robust to controls for birth year, birth state, prior military experience, and county of residence; all other themes are statistically insignificant or borderline. ## Datasets used | Dataset | Role in paper | Wiki page | |---|---|---| | WWI Draft Registration Cards, First Registration June 5, 1917 (NARA) | Primary sample: ~936K Black male registrants; serial numbers, birth date/state, address, occupation, exemption claim; serial numbers used to reconstruct lottery order | No page yet | | NAACP Membership Rosters, ProQuest History Vault (NAACP Papers collection) | Main outcome: 233,517 member observations across 227 branches, 1912-1940; linked to census via name and address | No page yet | | Veterans Administration Master Index (VAMI), 1917-1919 | Veteran status measure: ~4M veterans who claimed VA benefits, linked to draft cards by name/county/birth date; 120,412 cards linked | No page yet | | Army Transport Service (ATS) Passenger Lists | Veteran status and unit assignment for soldiers deployed to or returning from Europe; ~6M passengers; Black units identified via *Directory of Troops* | No page yet | | 1930 Full-Count Census (IPUMS USA, Ruggles et al. 2024) | Primary linking bridge: ~6M Black men; name, address, birth data, veteran self-report; socioeconomic outcomes (literacy, income, employment) | [U.S. Census Bureau data](/wiki/datasets/census/) | | 1940 Census (subset linked via Abramitzky, Boustan, and Rashid 2020) | Extended outcomes for wage income and college attendance | [U.S. Census Bureau data](/wiki/datasets/census/) | | Virginia and Connecticut WWI Veterans' Questionnaires | Survey mechanism analysis: ~1,300 Black army veterans' responses to "effects upon yourself" of draft, camp, and overseas experience | No page yet | | African American National Biography / ProQuest African American Biographical Database | Community leadership outcome (R3): 7,554 Black men born 1860-1900 identified as historically significant by modern historians and contemporaneous publications | No page yet | Main analysis sample: 204,923 draft registrants linked to the 1930 census, of whom 35% are identified as veterans using the union measure (census self-report OR VAMI/ATS match) and 1.8% are identified as NAACP members. The NAACP membership data spans 1912-1940, with the vast majority of observations from after 1925 (roughly 75% of all NAACP members from the mid-1920s to late 1930s). ## When to read the full paper Use the [original](https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf046) if you are: examining the full set of robustness checks (alternative linking strategies, alternative veteran status definitions, alternative first-stage functional forms including cubic polynomial and nonparametric specifications, alternative instruments based on actual vs. inferred order numbers) in the Online Appendix; studying the evolution of NAACP membership effects across the 1920s and 1930s (Online Appendix Figure A.IX) or the distribution of membership duration (Online Appendix Figure A.X); analyzing spillover effects of veterans on undrafted Black community members and the macrolevel relationship between local veteran shares and NAACP branch formation (Figure XII, p. 838); or replicating from the publicly available dataset at Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LSPICA). ## Attribution and rights Source: peer-reviewed, *The Quarterly Journal of Economics* 141(1), 2026, pp. 795-844. This distillation was extracted by an LLM on 2026-06-28 and is **not human-verified or independently reproduced**. The article is paywalled; extract-only applies. > Ang, Desmond, and Sahil Chinoy. "Vanguard: Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I." > *The Quarterly Journal of Economics* 141, no. 1 (2026): 795-844. > DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjaf046. © The Author(s) 2025. All rights reserved. > Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College. > This page is an **extract** by the Institute for Automated Research: core results and > equations re-expressed; not a reproduction.