Vanguard: Ang & Chinoy (2026)

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.

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
1940 Census (subset linked via Abramitzky, Boustan, and Rashid 2020)	Extended outcomes for wage income and college attendance	U.S. Census Bureau data
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 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.