Are conservatives the biggest defenders of the State?
You aren't describing conservatism as much as bankerism and corporatism. Check out where Obama got his campaign money in 2008. Few call Obama a conservative, but he sure fits the definition of corporatist. When your support comes from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, General Electric, IBM etc. you can't claim to be an enemy of the corporations.
Was Theodore Roosevelt a conservative because he was a Republican?
Roosevelt was a liberal for his day. He supported racial intergration, labor protection, environmental protection and anti-trust regulation. The Republican Party didn't become the contemporary "conservative" party until after the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was passed. In 1964, Barry Goldwater ran as a Republican nominee for President on a "state's rights" argument in favor of allowing states to keep segregation. His was the "smaller government" red herring. It MEANT "no federal civil rights legislation". Prior to that, the Republican Party had been the party in favor of stronger Federal government. In T. Roosevelt's day, they were most certainly STILL the Republican Party of the civil war in terms of Federal power favor. That change brought all of the former Dixiecrats to the Republican Party. They first went for Richard Nixon, who was not a conservative by today's standard. But as a whole, they flocked to Ronald Reagan in 1980 who DID support all of Goldwater's buzzword racism rhetoric. Goldwater himself repudiated what he started after Ronald Reagan added the "Christian nation" rhetoric to the Dixiecrat pandering. Though raised Christian, Goldwater was of Jewish descent and identified as partly Jewish. He apparently didn't realize in 1964 that his divisionary rhetoric set out to capture the Dixiecrats would eventually mean his OWN exclusion from the mainstream society too. How he could not have realized that, one wonders. In 1964, the KLAN adored him. Clue phone!