Dixon's Reconstruction-era novels depict Northerners as greedy carpetbaggers and white Southerners as victims. Dixon's "Clansman" caricatures the Reconstruction as an era of "black rapists" and "blonde-haired" victims, and if his racist opinions were unknown, the vile and gratuitous brutality and Klan terror in which the novel revels might be read as satire. If "Dixon used the motion picture as a propaganda tool for his often outrageous opinions on race, communism, socialism, and feminism," D. W. Griffith, in his movie adaptation of the novel, "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), is a case in point. Dixon wrote a highly successful stage adaptation of "The Clansman" in 1905. In "The Leopard's Spots", the Reverend Durham character indoctrinates Charles Gaston, the protagonist, with a foul-mouthed diatribe of hate speech. One critic notes that the term for marriage, "the Holy of Holies", may be a crude euphemism for the vagina. Equally, Dixon's opposition to miscegenation seemed to be as much about confused sexism as it was about racism, as he opposed relationships between white women and black men but not between black women and white men.