From the beginning of the Common Era into the nineteenth century, European Jews were prohibited from owning land, and by necessity many left agrarian life for urban occupations as shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. By the middle of the 19th century, Jewish reformers and Zionist nationalists promoted a return to manual labor and agriculture as a purer way of life, and as early as the 1840s communal farm societies were proposed in Europe and America. Pogroms in the 19th century drove hundreds of thousands of Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, to emigrate to America in search of religious and economic freedom. Most settled in eastern cities, but others joined an international movement that established farm colonies in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Israel. In the United States, forty agricultural colonies were organized in places including Sicily Island, Louisiana; Crimea and Painted Woods, South Dakota; new Odessa, Oregon; and Cotopaxi, Colorado. Clarion, Utah, had the largest population and land area and lasted longer than any settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many of these communities were undone by natural disasters, mismanagement, poor soil, and settlers' unfamiliarity with farming, and all but a couple failed and were abandoned within a few years. By the early 20th century, renewed pogroms and further emigration from Eastern Europe worsened overcrowding in eastern American cities, while a broader Back to the Farm movement, endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt and advanced through the Country Life Commission in 1908, encouraged keeping farmers on the land and creating new agricultural enterprises.