No – Philo Dough is not what philosophers get paid.
And just as every patriotic diatribe is attributed to Paul Harvey.
I predict that 5000 years from now, archaeologists will determine that the Internet was written by three people.
Even the one about the different kinds of lies that Twain himself attributed to Disraeli.
You don’t even know who he is! 
You’re being hard on him. Every major newspaper has a style manual, and they differ from one another over minor minutiae (Kidnapper or kidnaper? Mr. or Mr? Etc). Every small newspaper picks the style manual of one of the Big Boys. As a result, there are multiple correct spellings and punctuations for quite a few words out in the wild, and M’Cormik’s influence is still being felt.
Also, over here, bad grammar/spelling becomes good grammar/spelling over time, according to principle of common usage. There aren’t any “language police” except for some self appointed holdouts like Miss Manners, and about all they can do is shake their heads at the crumbling of our society. Here’s an example, the word forte (as in area of expertise) is pronounced “fort”. But so many people pronounce it “four-tay” that its becoming widely accepted, and now using the original pronounciation will likely get you corrected.
Another factor is that the U.S. is a huge place, and there are tons of regional linguistic oddities, usually brought over by immigrants. In some cases, they Americanize <tm> some of the language, in some cases they don’t. Over time things morph and shift until almost unrecognizable from the original.
I think the inconsistency of it all is confounding to Brits because they have a much smaller land and a much longer history. You have a sense of vast history, hundreds of years of tradition to give you a background of what’s “proper” to measure against. You have a recognized and accepted standard. We don’t have that in the U.S., and it really is such a huge melting pot of different people, cultures, and languages that we don’t have that standard from long history to draw from. It’s all driven by thousands of different cultural elements, rather than a unified whole, which is why it’s so inconsistent.
It’s not as though American English veered off and British spelling remained than same, they both continued to change over time.
Those Brits do have buckets and buckets of history, certainly, but British spelling was all over the place for most of that history. The first standard (that I’m aware of) that had some serious influence was Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, which wasn’t published until the mid 1700s.
Just out of curiosity, I’m wondering what you meant by using the trademark bug. “Americanize” is a perfectly ordinary word.
The British would spell it “Americanise”.
I’ve noticed that in many cases where the standard American and British spellings differ, the American variants are “less French” (eg. check vs. cheque, center vs. centre, colour vs. color) or “less Latin” (the British are more likely to keep the "ae"s and "oe"s that look weird to an American). Was this part of Noah Webster’s intention in his spelling reform? Or simply an effect of the fact that the classic British education was more likely to involve French and Latin? From the Wikipedia link upthread,
I don’t know, but Melville Dewey wanted to become Melvil Dui. He stopped at Melvil Dewey.
Here’s Dex’s article about him.