In 1941 Muse, running as the Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, lost overwhelmingly to Democrat Colgate Darden, a member of the state's Byrd Organization.

Senator Harry F. Byrd and Richmond newspaperman James J. Kilpatrick as they fomented opposition to the United States Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education which overturned racial segregation in public schools.

Beatriz was the daughter of Katherine Baker and Pedro de Regil, the owner of a vast henequen plantation in Yucatan and was raised in Hacienda Uayalceh.

Phillipa Millard's grandchild is the writer and multimedia artist Elena Botts [9] who has created art surrounding Hacienda Uayalceh and family histories.

[11] After selling shoes near Petersburg and the part-time political career discussed below, in 1939, the elder Muse enlisted in the U.S. Army as World War II began.

During his World War II service in the U.S. Army, Muse, assigned to Washington, D.C., bought a farm in Manassas, Virginia (then a distant suburb).

After both a three-judge federal panel and the Virginia Supreme Court declared most of the Stanley Plan (a package of laws designed to support Massive Resistance) unconstitutional on January 19, 1959 (birthday of Robert E. Lee and a Virginia state holiday), Muse (who considered himself a "fighting moderate" rather than a liberal) directed the Southern Leadership Project of the Southern Regional Council, an early private civil rights organization.

Retiring from both farming and publishing in 1966 (as President Lyndon B. Johnson began implementing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and funding desegregating schools), Muse and his wife moved to the newly developed Reston, Virginia.

He died at his home two decades later, and was interred at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church cemetery in Prince William County.