The USA electrified very early relative to much of the world, so we were building upon the oldest and most primitive system.
I love these little myths Americans tell themselves about doing things first.
The first
general power station in the world is generally accepted to be in Godalming, Surrey, England. It was commissioned in 1881, and by 1882 8-10 households were connected up. The Holborn Viaduct electric light company started up the same year, and rapidly proceeded to where it had 1000 light bulbs on its supply.
However, I'm sorry to report that the French beat us to as to the first public
use of electricity, in lighting up L'Avenue de l'Opera ten years earlier in 1878. The Germans (Siemens) were into the game pretty early too.
Edison's Pearl Street station in New York went into operation the same year as the Holborn Viaduct one in London (also an Edison owned plant), so America was electrifying at the
same time as the rest of the world (those bits likely to electrify back in those days), not very early relative to the rest.
In 1887 an 800 kVA power plant was built in Deptford, East London, completed in 1891, it supplied central London over a 10 kV line, believed to be the first use of a high voltage transmission line.
Small, single household private supplies existed before this of course, I'm just talking about public utilities. In the case of private and early public supplies there was little standardisation, which is the point at which systems tend to build inertia.
So there's no special history that forced the US to live with existing standards because they started earlier than anyone else. Everybody was building on "early and primitive" systems at the same time.