Edit: I thought you were joking and that the answer was more like printing presses and a lack of an official "standard English" in the 1700s/1800s, but it turns out the answer really was closer to what you said. Noah Webster deliberately decided to make American English diverge from British English when he wrote his dictionary.
American English allows the single l form, like traveling or modeling.
I stand corrected; American English uses double-l in places like "compelling" but not always in places like "canceling".
well to be fair american english is just a bunch of typos someone made standardised on because he didn't like the british
Standardized*
/s
Edit: I thought you were joking and that the answer was more like printing presses and a lack of an official "standard English" in the 1700s/1800s, but it turns out the answer really was closer to what you said. Noah Webster deliberately decided to make American English diverge from British English when he wrote his dictionary.
Yeah, I researched for a throwaway comment, what of it? (I was gonna comment this but decided to read the wikipedia article to ensure I was accurate)